#but ultimately the trick was 90% of my background image should have been css elements instead

[elftwink]

am currently working on a neocities site (which i cannot give you the url for yet because im working on the css still and there's no content also it looks ugly still) and oh man does it take me back to ye olde days of custom theme editing on here. i still use a custom theme obvs but back in like 2014/2015ish when i was really into indie rp custom themes were all the rage and you would spend hours editing some character specific image for your bg and then another several hours trying to make the css line up with your image (never at any point did i attempt to actually like. learn html or css. i just read other people's theme codes and edited the parts i could understand and solved problems as they arose. i distinctly remember one time i was using a base that had two sidebars and i only wanted one and deleting the section broke the theme in disastrous ways [bc i had no idea what i was doing] so i literally just made all the elements in the sidebar transparent and moved them off the screen LMAO. the best i ever got was moving from fully built custom themes that i edited to base themes that i built off of)

anyway while im slightly better now (im even reading tutorials! am i following them? sorry i have to go i think someones calling me) i am using a layout builder to build the homepage so it is even more reminding me of mid-2010s tumblr. much like building off a base theme, and definitely easier to understand than tumblr theme building (this time i at least know what all the different pieces of code are doing, even when im not sure how or why, or how to duplicate the effect under slightly different circumstances. but progress is progress!).

a good but annoying thing about the layout that im using is that i havent actually edited the site wide stylesheet, just used internal css on that one page, so when i go to make literally any other page i'll have to start from scratch. this is good because i am learning a lot and i think without doing it this way i would end up with a bunch of useless stuff in the stylesheet that really should be page-specific that i would have to correct with internal or inline css later. annoying because what do you mean i have to make decisions about the sizing and positions of the content? i literally just did that

also im kind of nervous to touch the general stylesheet because im pretty sure what i'll actually want to do is have a couple of stylesheets for different 'sections' of the website, to maintain cohesion between pages of the 'same' type but still allow a lot of fun customization on a per-page basis, but that requires deciding what 'sections' i want on the website and that is a whole other can of worms. but also you can't start without starting so i should probably just try to build a really simple layout and go from there (after all, if it sucks, it's not like i can't just create a new stylesheet, or do the css for each page independently until i hit a groove that's actually worth moving to the stylesheet). but also first i have to finish this goddamn homepage. which means i gotta find a header image that doesn't look ugly as shit