How I made this site

i’ve known some bits of HTML/CSS since middle school but didn’t get a better understanding of it until high school. a lot of this is just straight up hard coded. no templating or frameworks. i really wanted to harken back to the 90s-2000s era of the internet, for nostalgias sake, and i have a vehement dislike for component based web design for non social media sites (react, angular, etc.). if you need one element for 1000s of posts or comments, sure, but for a small endeavour like this, i don't mind going analog.

background

The background is bubblespurplebg.jpg under the “Abstract Pink & Blue” section of Texture Town.

nav icons and footer images

Icons from the navigation bar and footer images are from pixelsea. Fun fact: this site is what led me to discover neocities! I was looking through 2024 Webby nominies and this site was on that list. I felt empowered to start my own neocities site after seeing it.

glitter text gif

The title gif was made with Glitter text online

dollz

The Dollz are an interesting story. There’s several archival websites that save existing dollz that have been made over the years which are where I got the bases from (much love and thanks specifically to dollzmania ). But let’s be fr, the amounts of combinations are limited because doll making sites are rapidly becoming extinct.

Site owners can’t pay for their sites because all doll makers are essentially free, and then when the sites shut down they’re difficult to archive (they’re literally javascript powered drag and drop pages with thousands of PNGS).

So without a drag a drop editor, what do you do? There’s only a limited number of pale Prep dollz with curly brunette hair with highlights…

Enter Piskell, a sprite and gif editing site. I friggin love this site so much, I use it to plan my cross stitches usually lol.

Essentially what I did for both dollz on my site was uploading the doll with the outfit or pose that I liked regardless of the dolls appearance, and then importing a doll with hair that I liked on a new layer. Bc all these prep dollz used very similar templates you could essentially move one head on top of another and do some small pixel cleanup around the shoulders and hair. Then if I wanted to be real fancy, modify the skin tone and outfit colors by just using the fill tool lol.

So like, did I make these original dollz? Absolutely not. But who ever has? (unless you’re Melicia Greenwood herself lmfao) Every doll is based off of her dollz, thrown into a maker tool, and mishmashed into new dolls. The only difference is I’m editing them pixel by pixel. So yeah I’m claiming creative ownership over them lmfao. But if you like them and want them for your site, by all means, download them and put them on your site :) (no linkbacks pls, be a good internet citizen ❤️)