I’m a beginner at webweaving. I first discovered this free web community months ago, and tried to hand code my own site. My passion was at first strong, but I was soon met with a barrage of problems like layouts in css and figuring out why things weren’t displayed in the right place, or being displayed at all. All this eventually made me like the idea less and less, and eventually I stopped updating my site. Lately I had a new wave of inspirations and I wanted to try making a website again. This time I tried using a static site generator, hugo. It’s going good, but compared to others’ sites with playful layouts and stickers everywhere, my site does look a bit more rigid and boxed-in. Of course, they have probably spent months or years designing and coding their sites, and I’m not trying to best them in “creativity points” or whatever. I want to ask if anyone else have been in the same situation, where their technical abilities weren’t good enough to support their creative expression, and they had to make compromises? I imagine there has to be someone who’s had the same dilemma as I’m having right now, and I’d like to hear what you think. 
i always wanted my landing page to look like the tourist office entrance in torchwood 
with little posters on the wall next to the door
but at first i really didnt know how to do it so i settled on something different
and through making other pages, experimenting etc i learned a looot about how i can structure pages and eventually figured out how to do what i wanted!
i know everyone says “practice is important” about everything but it really is. and if theres something specific you want to achieve you can always ask others for pointers
Design is hard. Programming is hard. Creativity is hard. You’re very much NOT alone in this.
Like @juette says, experimentation and practice are important. Nobody comes out of the womb understanding relative CSS positioning.
I can totally feel you.
I’ve been there several times and I come back to this point every now and then. What I usually do is, I read tutorials, read the web and by doing so get better at it in general and even if I can’t achieve what I wanted to in the first place, I learn a thing or two that will probably come in handy the next time I get stuck.
By doing so you will improve and finally will be able to achieve, what has been on your mind in the first place. In the meantime you will develop and pursue new ideas. Don’t give up. Life is a never-ending spiral.
That’s why I can’t leave. There is so much I need to learn in this life first. I’m in the middle of it.
I got songs in my head. Pictures on my mind. My website isn’t as fine as I want it to be. I want to take pictures and paint with the light. I want to learn how to sing. Learn how to draw better. I want to be able to master my DAW one day. I want to build a boat… I could go on and on for hours straight - Darn… 
I would have to develop more abilities and improve on the existing ones constantly to follow my dreams. So this is what I do.
So, as someone that struggled with coding my own layouts for a long time, CSS Grid proved to be so much easier to work with and much more understandable. Stuff displays exactly where I tell it to, something I was never able to wrap my head around with flex-box. If you ever get the idea to make your own layout, again, I highly recommend using CSS grids.
As far as the layout goes, I’ve always been a very… practical person. I work best when I get the bare bones function down, first, and then slowly embellish the design over time. I look at the tricks other people use to make stuff look the way it does. I also like to use CSS generators and code pen to give me ideas for how I want to style my sections and borders and slowly add little tweaks over time.
I won’t ever be as fancy as some people, but that’s okay. It can kinda be a bummer but at least I have a site that is accessible, functional, and browsable, and that’s still pretty cool!
My creativity shows in my writing, not my web design. I prefer to keep the latter simple, and focus on readable text with clean, semantic HTML and just enough CSS.
Oh I absolutely relate. My website used to consist solely of sadgrlonline’s template. Meanwhile, the other day I made a page that’s a camera with working buttons: something I wouldn’t even have known how to start with a year ago, and I’m making templates and stuff just because I find CSS so fun & satisfying (2023 me is shaking at the mere idea of that statement lmao)
I think something I did that helped a lot was copying code for stuff I thought was cool into a code editor with real-time outputs (I use phoenix code) and then changing stuff to see what breaks/moves/changes to get a feel for what different tools do. After a while that gets you a better and better idea of what to google imo lol. I also use my old code as a kind of library. Like I barely remember how to connect my css to my html, I just copy my “head” area every time 
Your commend really clicked with me. Now that I think about it, the reason I’m building a website in the first place isn’t actually to show off my sick css skills and how I can always center an image or anything, but to show off what I actually do. A website is only a medium for the ideas I want to express. I might have gotten it completely backwards when I first started this forum post 
. Thank you for your insight.
You’re welcome. I was just rephrasing and expanding upon “content is king”, but I don’t like to call my work or anybody else’s “content”. I’m only a “content creator” when I’m in the bathroom.
I just wanted to reinforce what everyone has said already, which is that you are NOT alone with this. But I also wanted to add my own spin on it: each time I put together something new, whether it’s a new page, a programming project, etc., I try to add to it ONE thing that I haven’t done before. That way it’s not too overwhelming, but I am making some progress. After a while, it does add up, and you’ll find you can do things you never thought you’d be able to.
a perfect opportunity to link a video i go back to often! ira glass on storytelling. it is about precisely this. 
i am very prone to jealousy! when i see something - any kind of art - and think it’s really good, i often get really pissed off because i didn’t or can’t do it like that. i’ve found it’s helpful to collect things that give me that feeling and try to look at them more analytically - what specifically makes this work so well? what can they do that i can’t? what are the component parts that are adding up to this whole? when i feel like, “i want to make something like this,” what do i mean and what would it take to do that? do i like the look, the color, the mood…? do i actually want to make something like that specifically, or is it more the feeling or the impression or the creativity i’m jealous of? (usually it’s that last thing 
)
this is easier with websites than with other types of art i feel, since you can literally look at the code and see precisely what makes something the way it is. you can save a website and poke at the code in vscode and see what makes it tick. what does that number mean? change it and see what happens! what is this piece of code doing? delete it and see what happens!
i see people expressing things similar to this a lot when it comes to making a web site! i think people tend to get a bit overwhelmed by quantity of images and think that a layout is much more complicated or difficult to achieve on a coding level than it actually is. acquiring and curating a collection of images can be a lot of work, but it’s not coding work! if you want to put a lot of images on your page, you can do that with an ssg or premade layout no problem. i have a little tutorial for how to position decorative images actually! now you have the power.
& there’s lots of small things you can do to divs in a layout to make them less rigid or boxed-in-seeming; you can rotate them, color them, animate them, make them glow, make them different shapes, etc. even just giving things funny borders or background images can make a big difference. a normal-looking website that has one box spinning around with a bright cyan 30px thick border would be pretty funny i think.
being creative is hard. the easiest way to feel and seem creative is to refuse to discard bad/stupid/ugly/boring ideas and instead force yourself to execute them anyway.
ermmm kinda rambly but hope that helps 
I’m more in a situation where my time/energy are not enough. There’s so much I still have left to finish before I can upload my site and stuff I need to look up so I can figure it out. In theory, it probably helps that I’ve opted for something more minimalistic for now, but I still can’t seem to get something done.
It doesn’t have to be perfect or “finished” unless you need it to be. Take your time and do it your way.
for sure, and I’m sure most of us have been there. I burned out hard getting myself frustrated by things way too far from my current skill set. Small scaffolded steps, working on changing one thing at a time, and a lot of reverse-engineering things I like on other sites helped me a lot.
You’re already running an SSG which is great!
Thank you for the kind words. You’re right that it doesn’t have to be perfect, even though I’m a perfectionist. Sometimes even less-than-perfect feels exhausting, but that’s ok.
Nothing wrong with a site that’s less playful. 
It all depends on your goals. My site is blogging-oriented, and the design reflects that; my focus is on readability, ease of navigation, and ease of use. I could go absolutely nuts with the design if I wanted to, but that would distract from my writing.
If your goal is to build a creative, playful, busy site, just keep at it. That will come with time and more learning. Since you’re already using a SSG, look into using the SSG’s local preview feature (if you’re not already doing so). Being able to experiment and see your changes before you push them live helps a lot when you’re learning.
I felt some of that going in. A lot of people have a whimsical take to building old/indieweb. I got a degree in both art and computers. However I often feel/felt (not sure if past tense yet) some imposter syndrome because I go about it a lil differently. I’m actually not very good at that design or whimsy ( in art or anything ) and doubly so since my job makes me built for function first, then form. So I’m not used to thinking about making anything flashy as the goal. I’m thinking about how things can hook together more efficiently or something. However, I think you can look at the bright side of a situation too. Like everything is a spectrum. If you’re not a lot of one thing then you’re more of another. I notice a lot of really pretty and funky sites float to the top because they are novel or pretty but not all of them make a ton of sense to use or get finished. There’s a bit of a handshake with form and function. I realize I lean on the side of function(even though artist…) because I like revisiting sites that are easy to navigate and have some content I want to read again. So even some very basic “template” sites are charming to me because I know where everything’s at and what I want to look at again.
Nobody here should feel bad if their website doesn’t resemble the OG Space Jam website from 1995 or perfectly emulates the classic Geocities aesthetic.
Mine sure as hell doesn’t. This is what the new version of my about page looks like:
I think another thing to keep in mind, aside from the fact that you can start simple and add things as you grow in skill, is that you can have different looks on the same website.
I’ve focused on text and readability so far with my blog, but I plan to eventually add some skeuomorphic design to my project pages, making them more image focused while keeping the same underlying structure. I also have a section for CSS experiments and code jams which might not even use the same structure; next year I might join Weird Web October, and I know those pages won’t be standard~
After some thinking, I’ve decided that I’ll keep the articles and blogging section of my website simple and tidy using ssg, and I will hand-code my homepage. I already have an end goal in mind for my homepage, and even though I’m not likely to achieve a perfect version of it, I’ll keep trying to get as close to it as possible. Thank you all for the kind messages, I’ll post my website here as soon as it reaches a satisfactory state. 