I've been making progress learning html/css. I've used and am still using a lot of templates, but the BEANIE ZONE has so far been completely written by me. It's kind of janky but I'm proud of what I've done so far. :)
Special Thanks
These are some of the sites and tools that have really helped me get started with html.
Templatter
This is the site where I got the template I used to make my very first neocities pages. I learned the basics of html and css by tinkering around with the felinium layout.
Melonking
This site is great, I love it a lot. There's a lot to explore and see, and the code is very easy for me to read even as a complete beginner. I've learned a lot just by exploring melonland and inspecting various elements.
I especially liked the Nav-o-Matic nav bar, and when I reached out to melonking to ask if I could use its layout on my own site they said yes :)
Thanks again melonking!
Sadgrl.online
This is the first neocities site I explored, and browsing though it and other sites linked there I was eventually inspired to make my own. Sadgrl.online also has a lot of useful links that I refer back to all the time.
Bogleech
I can no longer remember but I'm like 90% sure I first heard about neocities from bogleech on their tumblr blog.
Atom Text Editor
At first I was just using the neocities editor to update my code, but that was getting very tedious.
There were a lot of little annoyances that were really adding up, even with how excited and hyperfocused I was. For one, I have my browser set to automatically clear cookies when closed, so I was constantly having to log back in to neocities itself when I had an idea. For another, everytime I made a little change just to see what it did, I'd need to make sure to clear my browser's cache. And of course, any time the internet went down or was interrupted I couldn't do any coding at all!
All of this was really slowing down the learning process. But I didn't want to just write code in notepad or something, since the color coding and formatting in the neocities editor is really helpful!
Eventually, though, I remembered that not only do offline coding text editors exist, but I already had one installed! I'd installed the atom text editor months ago during an attempt to learn python. I didn't get very far with python before losing interest, but it probably did help familiarize me with the process of writing code even before I started with html, and it definitely taught me where to find the atom text editor. So, special thanks to Python for Everybody as well.
Having a dedicated offline text editor has made this whole process much, much easier. I'm very glad I know about it.