There are many platforms such as wordpress, google blogger to
make your website on. Heck if you don't care about making a
unique looking site and just want to get your word out there
then you're probably better off just posting on social media.
There aren't even any baked in plug and play monetisation
options on neocities so why does this site still have a small
but dedicated userbase of web masters? Is it all just nostalgia
for geocities, or worse yet fake nostalgia by Zoomers who never
even used Yahoo!'s Geocities service but is just larping enough
to make people spend so many hours tweaking their sites to their
tastes?
First of all let's get one thing out of the way, if you are
thinking that making a generic site about anime or whatever
hobby you are into is going to get you some e-fame and tens of
thousands a views a month then you are wrong. So many web
masters go ahead and make bloated blog sites on wordpress when
in fact it only makes sense to use a Content Management System
if you're making a site with more than one writer/contributor.
Let's filter some more folks away by mentioning some more of
the cons of neocities, you can't use any server side scripting
as far as I am aware, so basically you can't make a template for
your site using php includes to edit the footer and header on
every page at the same time. No, you can only edit one page at a
time, unless you have some sort of complex text editor which can
replace text in multiple text files at the same time.
On a free neocities account you only get 1GB of storage so if
you have an image heavy site then you will have to hotlink your
images from some other image hosting service. And if that
third-party image hosting service goes down or your images get
deleted from their server then all the images on your site are
going to stop working, so you better keep a back up. For $5 you
get more storage and you can use your own custom domain though
you will have to buy the domain name from somewhere else like
namecheap. Honestly I think they should allow us to map my
own custom domain even on the free account like Google's Blogger
does. I have heard .xyz domains are cheap. You also get support
WebDAV which, as far as I understand, will allow you to sync a
folder on your computer to your website, so you can just edit
files on your drive with your own text editor, speaking of which
neocities the neocities web text editor is very basic so you're
advised to use your preferred text editor (be it vim, or
notepad++ if on Windoze). Finally the github for neocities looks
a bit inactive so it is worrysome. The last edit was 12 days
ago. To be fair I have not encountered anything wrong yet, and
only one feature which is absent which I would like to have (a
properly funcitoning RSS feed for my site, I know this goes
against the sandbox nature of the site but there just isn't
anyway to do this without server-side stuff, and anyway people
follow other sites through the social-media like feed interface,
an actual rss feed would not be a step down - as I could use my
own proper RSS feed reader to keep up with updates to sites I
follow). There are no detailed stats inbuilt, the only thing you
can see is a total hit counter for your site. The last con is
that you really can't have a self-hosted comment section,
basically you can embed disqus comment section, add a link to a
free "guestbook" site like smartgb, or yet some other third
party service like html box. People can post comments on your
site updates but it's kind of a mess as there is no way to get
updates for commets you leave on other people's equivalent of
facebook walls, so you wouldn't know if the site owner replied
to your comment.
I would argue though, that this last con really is not a con,
as you will soon find out when working on your site - no matter
what website platform you are on your site is not going to get
many viewers and almost no comments. When once in a blue moon a
comment will show up you will be happy but that happyness will
ruin yout pleasure of working on your site. Why would this be
the case? Well, because when you receive one comment you will
expect more to follow then when they don't follow then you will
wonder why you bothered at all writing that wall of text
pertaining to boring but personal and embarassing thoughts and
interests usually. Don't lie to me, I know it, literally every
hobbyist site is that. Basically you should never forget that
the reason you set up your site is to gain some pleasure for it,
some comfort, working on your site has to be comfy if you want
to keep on working on it for long, and not being able to see any
detailed stats or graphs with long term growth or comment
sections will help you be happy and have fun on the web again,
which will mean that you will want to work more on your site.
Basically the advantage of having your own little site rather
than being part of a community is that it's less of an
attention-whoring contest. There's a community on neocities and
I know a few site owners a bit, but for the most part we all do
our own things and regard each other as independent creators and
not some community. I wouldn't mind to see more collaboration
but I like that if there is any it is from the site owner's own
initiative. I don't like how on social media you constantly feel
like you are packed like sardines with people you do not like,
or I should say that I do not like. I guess neocities is the
interent equivalent of living in a cabin in the woods but not so
far away that you are completely isolated.
The fact that there is no server-side crap encourages every
web-page on your site to be a bit different, for there to be
more variety because you are not locked into a template.
Sometimes the results of this are not good and lead to websites
which are difficult to navigate then again I have come to enjoy
figuring out how to navigate other people's sites which have
been "coded" in HTML and CSS. A lot of neocities sites do not
work well on mobile, not because you can't make a neocities site
which runs well on mobile as I have done but because many of
these web masters do not care about phone-users which is prettty
based, desktop is the way. There are no trackers or telemetry on
neocities and the software the server runs on is open source
though good luck getting it to work - but there is no need to
install any complex server software because your site is
perfectly portable. This website, Otaking, is only 3.41
megabytes in all and I can download a back up of it at anytime.
In fact many people on neocities run their own mirror site to
the site they host on neocities, mine's at sosbrigade.club.
Unlike when using a CMS like wordpress you will actually know
the basics about why your website looks like it does which means
that you will not be tied to any one platform. For example if
wordpress totally changes its editor to a modern trash called
Gutenburg as it recently did, that doesn't concern you as you
can still edit your site in your preferred editor. If you are a
complete n00b as I am then I recommend you to download the
SeaMonkey web browser and check out its visual html editor
"Composer." Even worse closed source platforms like wix or
weebly could shut down at any time and you will lose all the
work that went into designing your site, then again if you used
Wix to design your site you didn't really put any effort to
design your site.
There are no ads on neocities, so as far as I am aware the
platform is just run with the $5 subscriptions, as far as I am
aware there have been no investors, the problem with investors
is that they want returns for the money they lended which leads
to things like ads being introduced and other features that are
not in the interest of the user. The guy who owns and runs
neocities is a liberal from what I have heard, yet he has not
censored me or anyone I know yet, and I think I have been edgy
enough so you should most likely be fine. Another nifty
feature which sort of acts like an old fashioned "web ring" is
that you can see what sites other sites on neocities follow, so
after you have found one or two sites you like you just have to
go through the sites that they follow so you won't be running
out of sites to explore any time soon. There's thousands of
them, a few of which have a couple of million views. Usually the
meme lain sites, don't take them too seriously, they're just
pretty to look at but a good shock therapy to the lame and
sterile web design of most websites. I don't think neocities
will ever become popular and I am more than fine with that
because things which become mainstream have a tendency of
getting ruined.
By Otaking, or The Good Student