#'site-building' tutorials will almost always lead you to like. coding bootcamps and stuff for companies

[mountmortar]

do you happen to know any site building tutorials to follow and learn from? been having a hard time finding a place to start with my own neocity but the free reign and customization of them interests me a lot :0c

ABSOLUTELY! I do want to stress one thing if HTML/CSS is something you're not familiar with: It's okay if your website doesn't look like the most creative, eye-popping thing in the world! I've seen sooooooo many people get so discouraged because their beginner websites don't look like the flashier websites you see on Neocities' front page (by people who've been coding for a Long Time, mind you!) and like!!! That's fine!!! The code of my own site was quite possibly the worst thing you've ever seen thrown together into one big CSS soup before I Literally Just Rewrote It Today, After A Year Of Having A Neocities. And so, with that being said:

As anyone on the internet might do, w3schools is the absolute first place I'd recommend to beginners! There are videos, it's mostly a text-based learning site with lots of exercises to test your knowledge. If you'd prefer videos:

My personal favorite guy on Youtube to learn coding things from is Giraffe Academy: Here's his full course on HTML! The video itself is about two hours—I skimmed through it and everything seems to be perfectly oriented towards beginners (I haven't watched it in its entirety, but I have seen his videos on C# and Python [programming languages, don't worry about it] and they did a lot to help explain certain things to me that I didn't know previously!).

BroCode's HTML in 1 hour and CSS in 1 hour are pretty good! His videos do include a little bit on how to implement some JavaScript here and there, but nothing major or terrifying.

Here's a playlist of HTML/CSS tutorials in bite-sized videos, too! Think about 10-25 minutes per video.

I will say that searching for YouTube videos on HTML/CSS will always sort of gear more towards what people in the professional sphere are looking for rather than what you'd see on Neocities.

As for Neocities-specific things (which may be the actual point of your ask! Might've misinterpreted the hell out of it oops):

sadgrl.online is perhaps the most known website on Neocities, largely because the website itself not only has a layout maker you're free to use if you want to make a website now but the thought of writing HTML/CSS from scratch terrifies you, but also HTML/CSS guides themselves! There's also a bunch of links you can use to help fluff up your site a bit, generate HTML code for you, or just fluff up your site in general.

The Melonland Project is also dedicated to providing website development tools and tutorials for beginners: here is its guide to making a website on Neocities! It also provides a link to learnlayout.com, which I'll link here as well—a website for helping you learn CSS layouts!

And, once you've got the hang of how CSS works but are still feeling unable to code it yourself (no ideas? just not feeling up to it? FUCK MAN DO I UNDERSTAND THAT) Eggramen has free CSS pages you can use, and all you have to do is write the HTML for it!

But I would always focus more on learning HTML first before any CSS—and then learning how to integrate CSS into HTML via inline styling (which those video tutorials do!) before worrying about any external stylesheets or whatever. HTML is the actual building block—CSS just makes it look pretty.