For the second half of Code Your Way, I'd like to make a personal website that acts as both a portfolio site, but also a space for me to post whatever I like.

My presence on the internet is almost non-existent (intentionally), so I need something that verifies my existence to employers or curious parties but also serves as a sort of blog but also not totally a blog… Amorphous use cases, but it's all me.

Due to the split use of this website, I'd like to code it relatively from scratch, as a means to make it as elastic stylistically and functionally as possible.

I believe this is a project that I could finish within the 7 weeks of this course, or at least the majority of it. Finishing this project means having a live, hosted website living on the World Wide Web that I can update relatively easily and not be embarrassed to link people to.

The audience is anyone curious to see what I do. Not sure who that is, but hopefully there are a few. The interaction will consist of looking at whatever I let them see in a somewhat playful manner: images, video, 3D models.

Style References

My friend Josh's site — I love this site because it feels like Instagram without being on Instagram. It's also fun and whimsical while also being informative. As someone who also varies in creative output, the act of not attempting to group them by medium but rather showing them all together is really nice. It gives the audience an idea of your interests and processes being fairly broad.

Museum of Jurassic Technology site — retro early internet website vibes. A little spooky, mysterious. The functionality is nice in that it is extremely simple and thus intuitive. I do not want to reinvent the wheel.

Heaven's Gate cult website — Obviously I do not agree with Heaven's Gate or their actions but I do like their website. It might be due to it not having changed much from the late '90s, but again, retro spooky vibes. I like the information dump of links, the repeating static background image, contrasting colors and light use of gifs.

Eraserhead DVD Menu Easter egg style — content warning: faux dead cats, freaky deleted scene, very Lynchian. Design inspo from this is mainly the weird switchboard and telephone you have to dial to get extra content. I like the encouragement to explore both the webpage and DVD menu via extra content access through unexpected means. I also enjoy the strange way it is displayed and how the menus avoid traditional UI presentation.

Technical Considerations

I have never built a website but from some preliminary research, I will have a few phases/chunks to learn. I am going to list them out, not because I believe this is rare or hard to find information, but that I want to make sure I understand it.

Frontend - The styling (design, structure) and the part that the user interacts with. HTML, CSS, can be done in Java?

Backend - security and data processing stuff, I am actually unsure how much of this I need to do for a project like this. I have read this can be done with JavaScript, via Node.js and Express.js

Some sort of database for storage (do I need this or is this also just for websites with logins and stuff?)

A webhosting service of some sort

ChatGPT has also recommended I look at different frameworks, which I need to take a deeper dive into.

I'd like input on the following:

Language recommendations (unsure if I need more than Java, HTML, and CSS)

Advice on what I need for backend stuff (very confused)

Other repositories of cool old websites for design inspo