Web Development for Artists: 1

Grant King

Grant King

— 2 min read
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Hello and welcome to the first installment of this series, "Web Development for Artists"

If you are joining us as an artist or author who wants to learn some practical skills in the realm of web development, you are in the right place! Even if you don't identify with either of those prestigious roles yet, you may be interested to stick around and learn some useful and easy things that will surely help you along in life.

So welcome, new student. If you have made it this far, you are already officially enrolled in this unofficial course.

Here I want to divulge some information in a way that I hope will be useful to you, student. I've been learning about computer science and web development for a long time, and I think I have some good advice about it that is best for me to spread rather than keep inside.

I feel this obligation to educate is truer than ever, now, because there is some overwhelming number of sources of competing educational content. The majority of what I see out there is outdated or (in my opinion) misguided. AI chat (in its current state) is no way to learn about proper web development techniques (unless you have the time and patience to learn by seeing how not to do things). I know it can be overwhelming to wade through the muck and find the good stuff.

I think a lot of people are discouraged before they are able to find learning resources that match their particular information-processing capabilities. This may be especially true for artists and authors, as web development content is usually presented by people with a formal computer science education, which yields a particular style that may be fairly indigestible when consumed from an artistic disposition.

Anyways, I hope to be one source of one version of this "good stuff" web-development educational content in order to help you artists and authors find your way to humble fulfillment without too much frustration and delay.

Let's get to it.

The first step is practical action. From this first step, you can build more. This first step is only emotionally difficult; it is important to resist stumbling here. People think they need to learn before taking this step, I say that is absolutely not true and cause for many a tragic and educationally fatal misstep.

So here it is, your first step: launch a website. Now, do it now! Before you succumb to the gremlins of 2nd guessing yourself. It can be done for free in 2 minutes without a bit of rush.

I'll tell you exactly what it involves so you believe me:

  1. navigate to https://neocities.org
  2. create an account: website name/username, email, password, and tags (tags are optional search terms, ie "programming" "art" and "writing")
  3. Choose the free account option, confirm your email, and continue to the "dashboard" page.

The hardest part is done. Congratulations! You are now both an artist/author and a web developer. In the next segment, we'll get into how to change your new website.

Don't forget to share your work! Networking and community are very important aspects of independent web development. So before you go, dear student, please drop your new website name or address down in the comments. You can find your website address prominently displayed in red on your Neocities dashboard. It contains the username you just chose. The address will be something like https://kingbook.neocities.org 🎃

<3 Grant

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