creating my website

As of writing this, I've had this website for three days, and it's proved to be a bit of a challenge. For one, I've never taken a graphics design class before, so trying to figure out the colour scheme of my site was definitely the first step. The second step was actually putting in the code for the side, and the blank screen was intimidating for a novice like me. So, I did what any beginner would do, and I went looking for pre-made themes that were free to use. Whenever I found a theme, I always had to take into consideration that by the time I was done customizing it would look completely different. So the main questions I asked myself were, one, would the theme fit my over all aesthetic? I want to make sure that whatever I put on my site really resonates with me, so I shouldn't choose something that doesn't stand out to me to begin with. Second question, would this theme still look nice even after I give it a complete makeover?

In a lot of cases, the answer was a resounding no. Believe it or not, the theme that I am currently using for my home page was originally a Sailor Moon theme. But after a bit of playing around, I was able to fully customize it and now it's hardly recognizable from its original theme. Now I will say, in these past few days I feel like I've learned quite a bit even though most of the hard work was done for me. I'm more of the tactile type, I need to do it myself to understand how something works, and tinkering around with the codes that I found really seemed to help a bunch. In some ways it was frustrating when I messed up a code and had to try to restore it back to the way it was, especially when I had to ask others for help fixing it. But in other ways, I'm glad I decided to go the "easy" route with pre-made themes, because I was able to get myself into coding without upsetting myself at how long it was taking me to learn simpler things.

It took me a day and a half to figure out how to get the home page looking the way I wanted, and it took me two days just to figure out how to write text in a box like I'm doing now. I think the main reason why it took me this long to figure out something so simple is because I was trying to figure out how to do it myself. It doesn't seem that hard to put text in a box, but when you take into consideration that you have to put in work to make it look nice, it starts to become much more of a task.

But as you can see, I was able to figure it out, and now I think I'm at least halfway through in the customization aspect of my website, and now I need to start actually putting content in here. It might take a while before every link on the front page is working, but "a while" is better than not at all. :')

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