A caveman's experience with web-mastery and site hosting

I am not smart. That's going to be my very first and most important statement, so if you, the reader, thinks that for some reason it's hard to create your own site... You may be a little right! It does take a substantial amount of effort and focus, but it is not impossible. The purpose of me writing this is to share knowledge I had a bit of a hard time processing due to technical jargon I found cryptic, at best, and make it a little more accessible for people like me.

There's several ways to host and share your website: Neocities is a pretty big boy, and it's a great start! There's also several templates, interactive makers, and a million guides on 'How to' do whatever you can come up with. The point of this piece, however, is immortalizing my experience with a method that's not as usual amongst most of my peers, friends, and colleagues - the effort of creating a website and maintaining it was inspired by Scumsuck. They've got a site! You gotta check it out.

The very first thing is you need to do is having a good folder structure. It's not complicated, just make sure you keep track of where's what and you're good - be consistent! It'll pay off and it'll save you a ton of time later.

So you got everything up and running, great! Using Live Preview (an extension for Visual Studio Code) allows you to see in real time what you're doing with your code , so you can know instantly if you messed something up. Once everything is up to your liking, it's time to Push.

GitHub is a cool platform: if you're into software development, you can store, share, and collaborate on other people's projects. There's a lot of stuff up there, but our interest lies in the storage part. You need an account for this, though, so go ahead and do it. You're also gonna need GitHub for desktop, download it, and log in.

Next, you will have to upload a 'repository', which is the folder from which all of your codes and assets will be sourced from. It's very important you keep a good folder structure, as I mentioned above, for both the functionality of your site, and any future addition you got in plan. Go into your GitHub desktop. Once in there, things may be a little overwhelming. Don't worry. Drag and drop your repository into the GitHub window, and it'll ask you if you want to add it. Say Yes (to the dress) and boom! Now you can Publish it!

Name it as you will, you can even add a little description, and keep it private! It's your own personal website, after all. Once it's published, it's officially online. Somewhere on the web. If you check your GitHub dashboard on the internet, you will see it!

Everything you do on your PC to the files you got in your repository will be synced to the one that's available online on GitHub. To keep a clean record of what you're doing, you will have to write a summary. Be short, and press 'Commit to main'. On the main panel, 'Push origin' will be highlighted. Press it, and that's what you'll be basically doing for every little thing you add or delete.

For the Vercel bit, things are a little bit more straightforward. Vercel gives you the option to directly log into your GitHub account and upload any repository. Select yours, and. My God. You're done! All that buildup was meant for this exact moment.

This guide is intended for people who want to use this particular method but were discouraged by how complicated it seemed. I think what makes it appear that way is how platforms like Vercel and GitHub are seemingly disconnected from one another, but in reality, they are more intertwined than we give them credit for.

I hope you (the reader) finds this guide useful! If it helps you, I'm glad: it's meant to make resources and knowledge more accessible. I a caveman like me could do it, I can't imagine what YOU could do!