I've been making websites in pure HTML and CSS for about 6 years, on and off, culminating in the site you're viewing right now, which I believe to be the peak of my web design at the moment. But of course, I didn't start with the knowledge needed to get there. Those past 6 years have been a massive trial and error process, iterating and learning about all the HTML tags and CSS attributes and all that other web dev bullshit. And honestly, almost all of my previous iterations have been extremely basic, even when I outright stole designs from example pages. That being said though, the end result of all that struggling is worth it to me, and I've always revisited those years in all my site iterations. Even the second "proper" website I made had my old site intact that you could view for yourself.

Anyway, without the pre-ramble bullshit, I shall begin going down memory lane and looking back at all the sites and versions I have made.

My First Website

Every web developer has a patient zero, and I am no different. I began my journey in late May of 2017, back when I was in the dreadful Old Roblox community. I saw a website for a project called Bepistown, that had a website on the free and static website host, Neocities. Seeing the website itself, and the domain it was placed under for myself, I felt intrigued, and most importantly, inspired. I wanted to do something like this for myself. So I registered on May 31st, 2017, and "began". I started by ripping off the code from a different site, and altered it from there. I also used parts of the default Neocities page. The result? A barely cohesive mess. But it was something!

Sadly, this blurry, low-res screenshot is all there's left of it. At the time I didn't save any of my work locally, instead relying on Neocities' storage completely. Which means that this thing is completely gone and will never return. Maybe for the better, but having an important piece of the puzzle like this lost kinda sucks.

The "Geocities" Idealism Era

Having gotten some bearings on the HyperText Markup Language, I decided to expand my site into something a bit bigger. Something with maybe a bit more content than just 3 pages and ripped off basic code. That's when I began to have this obsession with the spiritual predecessor of the webhost I was using, GeoCities. For whatever reason, I thought annoying GIFs spammed everywhere and awful text colors was the coolest fucking shit I've ever seen. So naturally I took elements from it for my site. Namely the overused space GIF for the background, and some other GIFs. I actually did briefly have a site on the real GeoCities, which was still operational on Japanese Yahoo at the time, but it got lost when that eventually shut down as well. It wasn't much better than what's to come.

If you can even decipher anything from this tiny photo, I salute you. But seriously, it really wasn't the best color wise, and I'm pretty sure the code was actually also stolen from another site. LMAO.

Around the same time I was making the main site, I was doing some other weird side projects on other Neocities accounts. The one that arguably got the most development, was chillwave. Named after my favorite genre at the time, it was a tryhard mesh of "vaporwave y2k" like GIFs. While a lot of it is broken nowadays (it originally played music in the background), it never really was that great to begin with. The markup in this is so bad, it flatout crashes the W3 Validator when I tried to see how many errors it had in it.

Ironically enough, this site has the most views out of any of my Neocities accounts, including the main site. I can kinda see the charm in it as a "humble beginnings" type thing, where it was still the infancy of my web dev experience, and I was just making pages to try new things. However on it's own, I would say it's pretty bad, and I don't know where the amount of views comes from, other than the tags having "90s" and "vaporwave" in them. Oh well.

Eventually, the main site got made into its final iteration.

Somewhere around the time of chillwave is when I wrote a pretty pathetic and embarassing rant in a Discord server I ran that was for web development. It was about webhosts with WYSIWYG editors, claiming that they're total shit while Geocities style websites are the best. And while the general point of WYSIWYG editors sucking out soul from web design is correct, the whole thing will always be funny to me, because the statement of "Geocities style sites are the best" was supposed to be about that website you just saw above. The peak of web design.

About that, actually. Technically my first website was a site made on Weebly, one of my targets of the aforementioned rant. It was a fanblog that presented itself as an unofficial Toontown newsletter of sorts, made by people who are actively rebelling against the Cog uprising. If you don't know Toontown lore, this won't make any sense to you, but it was a thing. However, since it was made in Weebly, with a template I didn't make, I don't count it as an actual entry in the museum.

Trying To Create Something Else

Eventually I dropped the whole Geocities schtick outright the following year, and moved on to pursue other things with my website. I wanted to actually somewhat stand out, rather than blend in with the 10,000 other "90s Geocities like" websites that plagued Neocities at the time. My second attempt was not exactly what I'd call great. Actually, I don't even find it slightly charming. It's downright awful.

Still, it was an okay start. I later joined the unofficial Neocities Discord server, and started to iterate my site into something else again. Still basic, but it at least had a semblance of content and decent design.

I followed it up with another layout, which had... stolen code! I'm surprised I didn't drop that yet, but I guess my lack of CSS skills were properly biting me in the ass back then.

All of this culminated into my final proper site on Neocities. I don't know what made me choose this color scheme, but I gotta admit, it's pretty alright.

After that, I decided to vanish from Neocities the following year. Lots of drama in Discords and stuff made me leave it behind and go for better options. I technically had an FTP site that was on paid hosting before, but it was mostly just a file dump with a small community around it.

The Independence

After all of that bullshit, I restarted the format again in the new year of 2019. I decided to start off simple to get into the groove again, and made this.

This was the beginning of the "Is Very Lame" era. Around the same time, I bought the domain for my new site, which for shits and giggles, was "isverylame.com" so that the subdomain could be a very original self-deprecation joke. I actually do still like that domain, and part of me wishes I could still use it.

This particular design actually didn't last that long, as I decided to make the site "edgier" with a red and black scheme. And to add a navbar to make it a bit more usable.

I still find this design a bit charming, although admittedly the #000000 background is a bit of an eyesore. I actually kept this layout for almost a year, if memory serves. The only real changes were the color scheme and graphics. I don't have that particular iteration around for some reason.

The final iteration of the "Is Very Lame" format kept the new colors and graphics, but overhauled the layout again to be more usable.

The reason it was final was because I moved hosting during that time, away from my own to have it hosted by other people. I eventually left and wiped the site, and that was that. I didn't really do much with web stuff for a few months after that, other than returning to Neocities briefly once they actually fixed my site to remove the expired domain it had.

Arriving At The Present

The "kark.at" era, as I like to call it, began a few months after the incident in 2022, after I wondered if registering this domain was even possible. I got into Homestuck and was obsessed with it for a bit, so when I found the domain was available, I took it. At first, it was just a simple landing page with not much going on.

Eventually, I got fancy with the main page and expanded it with stuff like the music page and 2 fun pages. Fun fact: The mobile Discord GIF picker inspired this TV-like page.

This particular layout remained for almost the entirety of this year. In early November, I experimented with a 3 column design in HTML out of boredom, and after a few hours, it evolved into the previous version of this site.

While I liked it at first, I quickly grew frustrated with it visually, and was in a bit of an intense self-hatred rut at that point. Since I liked to shit on it for not having a cohesive theme, I decided to think of some options, and settled for the current Lockstep theme on display.

I'm still really pleased with the current look. Having other people also praise it when I post it in circles I'm in definitely helps. I haven't felt this motivated since the very beginning of my journey, and I'm eagerly updating this site with more content and other tweaks.

We have now reached the end of our journey. If you actually read all of this insane nonsense, I do want to genuinely thank you. Hopefully it inspires you to pursue or further your own pursuit of web development. While there's been many, MANY moments of frustration, it always feels rewarding in the end when you make it through. If you've never tried it, I urge you to at the very least mess around with some basic HTML. It's always fun to see what other people make, and I genuinely hope someone out there is more eager to make their own mark in cyberspace.

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