Published: 2025年2月14日
Word Count: 1,417

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Now that I've been getting back into maintaining a website after all but abandoning my Neocities over a year ago, I've been thinking about how much I've grown as a webmaster, and the things I wish I had known when I was making my very first website back in 2023. While I've worked on three different websites over the course of almost two years, I would still consider myself a "beginner" when it comes to making static sites. But at the same time, I've learned a lot through trial and error over the years and wanted to share some of that knowledge, especially now that I'm seeing an influx of teenagers with minimal experience joining my current web host, Nekoweb (not that I think that's a bad thing).

My goal here isn't to teach anyone how to make a static site, rather this is mostly general advice that I think people should know. If you're looking for HTML/CSS tutorials, you're much better off going to a site like W3Schools. That being said, if you're making a website for the first time, I'd recommend you keep reading either way.

Tip 1: Host Images on Your Own Site
So, the whole reason I was inspired to make this article in the first place was because of a recent incident where the popular file hosting site file.garden went down for several days (as of the time I'm writing this, it's still down), which ended up breaking dozens of sites on Neocities and Nekoweb because users were relying on it to host their images.

Please, for the love of god, DO NOT HOTLINK IMAGES TO YOUR SITE. Or any kind of files, if you can help it. This is one of the first things I learned when I started making static sites, and it's been a cornerstone of internet etiquette for years for a reason. While bandwidth isn't as much of a concern as it was in the early days of personal websites, hotlinking is still a terrible idea for reasons like the aforementioned file.garden incident. File hosting sites can shut down or experience technical difficulties without warning, webmasters can change file paths or delete them altogether, or a myriad of other problems could occur, making hotlinking an incredibly unreliable practice.

I know that a lot of people defend hotlinking by saying that they only do it because otherwise the images on their site would eat up all their storage, but this problem can easily be avoided by putting in the effort to optimize your images for the web. I currently have over 40 images hosted on my site, and none of them are more than a few hundred kilobytes in size. Not to mention that hosting massive, high-resolution images on your site not only does a disservice to yourself, but to the people who visit your site. Large files take forever to load, and if your internet connection is slow enough, they might break altogether. Simply downloading free image editing software like Krita or GIMP, setting your image resolution to 72 ppi (the ideal resolution for web viewing), and scaling it down to the actual size you want it to be on your site before uploading it does wonders to save storage space. Having to sacrifice the resolution of your images may be a tough pill to swallow at first, but I promise that it will make the experience so much smoother for everyone involved.

EDIT 2月16日: As of today, another popular file hosting site, Catbox, has gone down as well. Again, HOST IMAGES ON YOUR OWN SITE. STOP HOTLINKING EVERYTHING.

Tip 2: If You Have a Layout with a Navbar, Use Iframes
This is something that I had to learn the hard way. Iframes can be easy to abuse, and can pose a security risk if you don't use them carefully, but a well-placed iframe can save you so, so much struggle. Navbars have been a staple of my personal web design philosophy since the beginning, but I didn't realize how useful iframes were until I wanted to add a new category to my navbar and had to manually edit the 20-odd pages I had on my site at the time. Nowadays, I just have to edit the HTML file where my navbar is located, and it will update across my entire site thanks to how I've set up my iframes.

Iframes are great if your site has a consistent layout because not only does it save you the hassle of having to edit every single page on your site every time you change how it's organized, it also cuts down on the size of your HTML files, since you won't have to copy and paste your entire layout whenever you make a new page. I really cannot emphasize how convenient they are when used well.

Some additional advice for using iframes from me would be to pay attention to where your links are being targeted to. Too many times I have seen iframe layouts where links to other sites open within the frame itself, rather than taking the viewer to the actual website. Some Javascript can also work a bit strange with iframes; just look at what happens when you try to use the "random" button on the FujoRing widget on my homepage (unfortunately this is not a problem that can be fixed on my end). It can take a bit of trial and error to get the hang of, but the payoff is well worth it.

Tip 3: Try Making Your Site from Scratch First
When you're just starting out with HTML/CSS, templates and site generators can be very tempting. I get it, I'm currently using a template for my site layout; using one makes it very easy to have a good-looking site with minimal effort on your part. However, I would strongly recommend that if you haven't made a website before, you should at least take a shot at making a first try on your own. It doesn't have to look very good or be complex in the vein of some top-tier, hundred-follower supporter site on Neocities/Nekoweb, but getting your hands dirty and figuring out at least the fundamentals of HTML/CSS and how they interact with each other on your own will massively help you if you ever use a template and want to customize it more to your taste. I have personally made four layouts on my own before deciding to use a template for my main site to make things easier on myself (if you're curious, those four layouts were my Castlevania archive, my old Neocities site, my DSRK shrine, and the previous layout that I was using for this site).

And as a side note, don't be afraid to have a site that looks a little ugly. Personally, I would much rather come across a site whose CSS left a bit to be desired but had tons of great, entertaining content that came from the heart than a site that looked really cool but had little to offer outside of a few stock pages.

Tip 4: CTRL + SHIFT + R
As someone who occasionally lurks in the official Nekoweb Discord server, the most common help request I see is something along the lines of, "I edited this CSS/Javascript file, but when I go to my site nothing has changed!!! WHAT DO I DO?!!?!?!" And the answer these people get is always, always, always CTRL + SHIFT + R. This ends up being the solution to the problem nine times out of ten.

So, what does CTRL + SHIFT + R do exactly? Based on my subpar understanding of how internet browsers work, what happens is that when you visit a website for the first time, your browser creates a cache of the site's data so that it can load faster on repeat visits. If a site's data is changed, it can take some time for that cache to update, hence why changes to your site's CSS don't always appear right away. You can just wait for the cache to refresh on its own if you'd like, but if you're trying to tweak something and don't want to wait hours or even days for that to happen, using CTRL + SHIFT + R will refresh the cache manually. It's an incredibly helpful tool when making static sites, and if you're in the Neocities/Nekoweb community, it's good practice to CTRL + SHIFT + R whenever you return to sites you've visited before so that you can always see changes as they happen.