This webmaster questionnaire was going around neocities. Unfilled here. Created by mouseling
Hiya, I'm Nullmi. Or Naomi/Nomy if you prefer a more standard name.
Since 2023, so about 2 years or so.
After I left tumblr and graduated college, I found it difficult to keep up-to-date with fandom. Naturally I drifted off towards OC content, but social media is quite notorious for ignoring original works. I tried a few sites that had a passionate OC community. Toyhouse was the closet site I came across, but its main focus was trading or selling characters.
There wasn't an emphasis on worldbuilding or OC stories on Toyhouse (or if there is I must have missed it under the sea of exclusive, limited time $100 adoptables). So I tried similar OC building sites like charahub and unvale. I even went back to gaiaonline for a little bit. But none of them stuck. (I went back to gaiaonline again to take request art but that's an entirely different story.)
I mostly stuck to mastodon.art and pillowfort as my main social media, but both sites didn't have a big community for OCs. I don't remember how it happened exactly but I eventually came across zelkova on pillowfort which lead me to their neocities site.
I wasn't aware that you can make a site for your OCs, I had thought that neocities was full of retro-aesthetic early 2000s websites. I didn't think I would have a space in the community. I went around linked banners, found a few webrings and found other webmaster's OC /world building sites. After discovering this side of neocities I felt like I found a perfectly wonderful corner of the web to settle into.
Mostly world building & OC, personal art & opinion/review sites.
I make a wire frame of how I want the site to look like in a vector program.
For web design / sites I really love:
They're simple, responsive and have great content.
Generally speaking:
And might be a little off topic in regards to web keeping, but I really liked how Kill 6 Billion Demons incorporated logs of world building lore into comic page descriptions or other pages of the website.
When the code works as intended.
Regular updates and letting go of perfectionism.
I generally keep the same layout - navigation links in the header and footer located at the top and bottom of the page, body content in the middle. I'm not a UI/UX designer but I generally like to follow some UI/UX rules to help visitors navigate my site.
Not at all confident, ha. My code has a lot of redundancies that might be optimized if I wasn't such a lousy coder.
<dl>?No, but it looks handy.
<details>
I search up tutorials. Then I try to see if I can make the concept work.
No, but I'm trying to learn.
No.
Purple?
Content. I like to keep the designs fairly simple. It works for me
Yes! And I regret it, ha. I don't really like having .art as my domain. Plus, NameCheap was bought out by a private equity firm recently. I'm considering a switch soon...
Not in my taste. Once you dive far enough into the indie web rabbit hole, they start to feel cookie-cutter in their distinct lack of personality and content. Your online presence doesn't have to conform to an aesthetic, and that's okay. Make it ugly, make it stupid, make it yours.
No, I haven't checked at all since I started. Checking now, it seems like I have about 7 errors. Not bad for my first time.
I love them. I love how many different ways people can show off their site links. It's such a nifty idea and more people should make one.
It's easy to overlook button text in the sea of pixelated graphics. The main function of a button graphic is to call one's attention and acknowledge an idea, an action or an interest. The intended function is rendered useless due to abundance of them all packed together, and frankly I find it juust a little peeving. It's like a city block full of neon signs, all vying for one person's attention. The message & intent is lost, so it's useless. It's bad design.
TLDR: Good when used sparingly. A clusterfuck otherwise.
Something similar, but maybe with the implementation of a light and dark theme switch.
Not really. I am often impressed but never envious. Being envious can kill your creative drive, you know.
Visual Studio Code
I tried Sublime Text and Adobe Dreamweaver back in the day and didn't like them.
It's good practice to host on your main server, so I mostly keep my images on neocities. I do have one blog entry that uses postimage, but I'll be fixing that when I have time.
After checking, Nekoweb does have FTP which is awfully tempting for my lazy ass. But otherwise, they're in the same family to me.
69.25mb. Hmm, didn't expect anything lower than 100 mb.
Former CS major, so backups in triplicate. Yup. Fun fact, I still have my digital art from 2013 from my family's ipad 2.
Simple. Highly visual sites are cool, but if I have a hard time navigating, I'm more annoyed than impressed.
Purple.
No, not at all. I do take long hiatuses, sure, but I'm often thinking about working on this site.
No, but I'd like to! It's hard to keep online friends though with my timezone and work schedule.
Yes, my siblings. They're my beta testers.
Not really. I try to update once every few months or so.
It's more or less the same. My spaghetti code is doing its best to hold itself together. I don't want to strain my code (or my sanity) any further.
A mix of me-focused and hobby-focused.
No.
Eh, not really. I've done wordpress site management for corporations and I wouldn't want to bring that into my personal life. For work, I'm a graphic designer.
I use email if I'm commissioning someone or if I'm taking commissions myself. Keep a record of your interactions online when it comes to money.
Yes I keep social media accounts. I don't think they're inherently bad, just heavily monetized. If you block that stuff out, or block out keywords then social media is tolerable.
I avoid instant messengers. I was on too many workplace chat groups and often got called into work through messaging apps. Remember the days before the 'read' indicator was invented? Good times.
Anyway, I'm a former workaholic. I'm trying to get better, so I hate being constantly accessible to people. I prefer forums or social media.
I wish I can say yes, but I mostly watch youtube in the background. When I do put on music, it's most likely a video game OST.
One site. I'd like to make a secondary site running on Rarebit if I had a long running comic.
I guess many? My site is mostly a hub for the stuff I've made and want to show people.
Online personas hardly reflect an individual's true personality. No matter how hard we try, we tend to skew the perception of ourselves in a more favorable light. I think it's human nature to want to belong and to be liked by others. In that regard, my online persona is the cooler, nicer version of me.
I've made cool mutuals! I'd like to be friends. Hi guys.
Yes. Grid system my beloved.
Flashing sites / Sites that are not mobile friendly.
Keep your navigation links in the same location. If it's in the header position, keep it there. Don't move it to the bottom of your page, to the left, or hidden away behind another menu. Don't make me pull out the Law of UX link again. Oh, never mind.
Also, look into responsive web design. Thanks.
I try to.
Only Microsoft Edge since it's the only browser besides Firefox I have installed.
Firefox. Use whatever browser works for you. Well, unless you're using Chrome. Then, use Firefox.
Windows 11
It's okay after you remove a metric ton of useless crap. Some people use debloat programs, but I'm old school and clicked around in the settings menu until the OS behaved better.
Yes, I spent some time ensuring that.
Unnecessary.
I think they're neat! I want to join in, but I don't feel like my site is finished enough.
I want to make a Tamama and Yuuko Ichihara shrine. Maybe even a Rose Lalonde shrine if I really feel nostalgic about Homestuck.
A little? I guess. I'm not the only one with an OC/Art oriented website.
Tag implementation... I'll figure it out eventually.
Yes. I draw my own assets and my own svgs haha. I had some fontawesome assets around my site but it doesn't make sense for a graphic designer to... not design their own graphics...
I would refer to this page on Cave of Dragonflies. The webmaster has been in charge of their site for 20+ years so I would reckon her advice is sound.
Some grids are hard-coded. I can probably fix that in CSS if I spent a little more time learning how it worked.
Awful for legibility and often have fonts that are too small.
Essentially the same as the former, no?
You... do realize that columns are just a design tool and have existed since the days of traditional layout design like newspapers and magazines? They're tied to grid compositions and layouts, which hopefully isn't going to be a dying art.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel here, layout design won't change today or tomorrow. We use columns. So, for the time being, sure. I subscribe to all three. Go columns.
By the way, here's a book about grid systems that implements columns. The book is quite old but it works fairly well in depicting why layout design matters and how you can utilize columns in your work.
Also, I KNEW I used a column-based layout when I made a bootstrap site years ago. Behold, CSS column based layouts.
I subscribe to Twelve Columns
Yes.
I'm always struggling so I'm sure I spend an equal amount of time on both.
Pass.
Only when the need arises since I'm a content first type of person.
Somewhere in the middle.
I do. As for why, my suggestion to any and all creatives is to pick up Steal Like an Artist. I got my copy after quitting my first job and landing my second, and I've kept this book's advice with me to this day.
I had a few myspace themes back in the day. Tumblr themes too. Then, in college I made a portfolio web site with bootstrap
Not that I'm aware of?
Like all design gimmicks, best used sparingly.
Percentage, but I've leaned into using em for font text.
(08.2026 Edit)
I'm a sucker for really bad decorative fonts, despite being persnickety about legible fonts and accessibility.
Also, in retrospect, I don't think I really have a favorite font. I tend to work with whatever fits my mood. I do have a few foundries that I happen to really like:
Sandoll
Korean type foundry
ComicCraft
Comic font foundry
radluka - Type Network
Decorative fonts. I like RL Aqva. Funkly little font.
Typodermic
They have a great public domain font pack available on their site.
No, because I'm nit-picky.
All the time. I like going through neocities recently updated list.
Yeah, I have Cave of Dragonflies bookmarked as well as some web comic sites. Uh, I don't see a reason why someone would bookmark my site.
How easy it is to navigate. I'm very proud of my shortcut buttons on my homepage.
Technology outside of websites? Not sure what that means at all.
Maybe 3 hours a day? Most of that time I'm reading manwha or korean web novels ngl.
🙋 Me, myself and I
No.
No. Did you know I'm a CS drop-out.
11ty is my go-to. I followed a guide on neocities on how to set it up, but it seems like the site link is broken.
No. I don't really care (short story)
(long story) Speaking from experience, it's all to easy to correlate the number you see to your self-worth.
I had a graphic design / marketing design job that was miserable, terrible. Campaign statistics were directly tied to our yearly performance reviews. The team and I worked long hours, worked weekends but according to the web and campaign statistics we weren't hitting our targets.
It felt like my life was a statistic and I was always falling short. The numbers just felt so arbitrary, and meaningless. Yeah, I worked past my 40 hours, I worked on the weekends and barely spent time with family, but did the numbers and view count reflect my efforts? No, and they never will.
I don't care about numbers on a screen anymore. You shouldn't either.
Around the beginning of the year I was on gaiaonline a lot. But uh, around the tail end of February there was drama going around one of the subcategory of forums that eventually encroached onto the rest of the active forum categories. Had to stepped back a little to let it cool off. I never returned because I got busy.
Straight into the editor.
No. I watch Star Trek.
My old 2P Hetalia fandom art will never see the light of day.
I'd like to leave an archive. I wish I had done that with my tumblr, but the porn bot takeover really pissed me off and I was sick that the site never tried to fix the issue.
I don't think I'm that secretive. I've revealed my nationality, the island I live on...
I don't really have an online bestie.
I do my best with Affinity by making them less than 1000px. I can probably push it by using an image compressor, but I really don't want to do that for every image I have on my site.
Interesting set of questions. It makes me want to dig up the ones that used to be on people's deviantart or fanfiction profiles and fill them up when I have time.
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