Naoto Hieda ran a small, hands-on, beginner-friendly workshop on building a personal website with plain HTML on Neocities. Hieda’s case for doing this rather than relying on Instagram was practical. A social feed limits you to images and captions, while your own page can hold hyperlinks, embedded maps and posts, and interactive p5.js sketches that visitors can actually use. They placed Neocities in a longer story of small, open corners of the web, from GeoCities to Glitch, which closed last year, as spaces where people can express themselves outside the boxes platforms impose.
Participants made free accounts, downloaded a template Hieda adapted from an existing Neocities HTML portfolio template, and dragged its files into their dashboards. To keep things casual, they built a cooking blog rather than an artist portfolio, and showed how the same structure works for showcasing creative work. Starting from index.html, they explained each step in plain terms: the page title that shows in the browser tab, paragraphs, headings as chapters, and unordered and ordered lists for ingredients and steps. The template injects a shared header and footer, so a site title changes in one place. Hieda kept the original template’s credit in the footer and encouraged participants to credit what they remix.
Echoing Daniel Shiffman’s keynote, they insisted on small steps: edit one thing, save, reload, and check, so that when something breaks you know where to look. They broke a tag on purpose to show what happens. When adding images, they covered habits that Instagram normally handles for you, such as resizing phone photos to about 1,000 pixels, choosing JPEG for photographs, and keeping file names simple. They also explained alt text for screen readers and noted that describing an image can be a creative choice. In the final minutes they embedded a p5.js sketch with the editor’s iframe code, which they described as unlocking a lot for anyone who already makes sketches.
Three takeaways
- Your own page can do what a feed cannot. Plain HTML can hold links, embeds and live, interactive sketches, not just images and captions (00:10:24–00:11:33).
- Edit, save, reload. Small steps make broken pages easy to diagnose, and breaking something on purpose is a good way to learn (00:26:20–00:28:49).
- Prepare images for the web. Resize photos, use JPEG for photographs, keep file names readable, and write alt text (00:37:45–00:45:23).
Try it
Editorial suggestion: make a one-page site on Neocities for a single p5.js sketch. Add a heading, a short paragraph about how you made it, the sketch embedded with the editor’s iframe code, and alt text for one still image. Save and reload after each change.
Watch and explore
Replay: Watch on YouTube
From the original program
Published before the event
Making a portfolio on Neocities
In this introductory workshop, you will be guided step by step how to make a portfolio website on Neocities (it's free!) 🌐 This will be a great opportunity to showcase your cat photos, music review or even interactive p5.js sketches 😼🤖✨
About the presenters
Naoto Hieda
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Naoto Hieda is a researcher and an artist from Japan based in Estonia enrolled in the PhD programme at the School of Digital Technologies, Tallinn University. With a background in engineering, Naoto completed Diplom II (master's equivalent) with distinction from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany and works internationally for theater productions and in the visual arts.