32
Help making a personal website in 2026? (without AI) (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
22 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I decided to make a new personal website. The last time I did this kind of thing was before the pandemic, and I did it with WordPress before, so my first instinct was to try WordPress again. But WordPress seems to have changed a lot since then. Or maybe I just forgot how annoying it is? Anyway, I found an interesting-looking theme to start with, but building on it is really frustrating.

Style changes don't apply throughout the site when it seems like they should. I can't change the font in the footer even though there's a place where you can supposedly do that (you can select a new font but it changes nothing). I can't move design elements around smoothly in the block editor, and I can't seem to get out of the block editor either (although maybe that's just a theme issue?). I'd like to make the background different on different parts of the same page, but I can't figure out how to do that.

Am I going about this the wrong way? Do I need a different theme? A plugin? Should I use something other than WordPress? I'm annoyed with all of the AI stuff WordPress is pushing at me anyway. Do I just need to bite the bullet and teach myself CSS or whatever, given that I don't want to vibe-code this site? Advice please!

edit: also, if there's a better Lemmy community for this kind of question, please point me there!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 4 hours ago*

Note: This is from the perspective of 30 years of web design, which is not to say I'm an expert, just that while I do personal projects, much of my time has been spent designing for small businesses and the like. I think it's a good way to go, mind.

If you want to learn coding by hand, you probably don't want to bite off learning HTML and CSS from scratch. Use a framework like Bootstrap (there are plenty of frameworks to choose from), which gives you a good baseline of CSS to start with.

If I was using something like Bootstrap, to get different backgrounds in different parts of the page - this is what "section" divs are for, because you can assign a background to each section. Well, this is true of divs in general, but in the Bootstrap contet you have sections. Inside sections you have rows, and then inside that you have columns. That's how you can set up the parts of your page, with content going in different subdivisions of the page.

If you prefer a more visual way of working, I can recommend WordPress and Divi 5 (specifically as opposed to Divi 4), although the latter is not free. But it is a highly flexible solution that gives you the power of WordPress on the backend, but a pretty darn good builder on the front end.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •