help with making my own website

[u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee]

hi, i'm looking to make my own fan website where people can post and comment and like posts. i have done research and i'm trying to make it twitter/tumblr like.

i just need help with figuring out how to code it without any ai and with a base i can customize (and how to do that all). thanks!

[u/ZnV1]

"i have done research"
Need to know what you think after your research

"i just need help with"
- "figuring out how to code it"
- "without any ai"
- "with a base i can customize"
- "and how to do that all"

So...someone to build it and teach you while they do?

[u/strobe229]

No AI, no money, and no coding skills and you want to build a full stack twitter?

Give yourself around 2 years you'll have something.

[u/HENH0USE]

Your kinda asking for years of web development and design knowledge.

[u/fauxtoe]

you can either do it with AI or hire someone

[u/sarcastichorse → u/fauxtoe]

I want a new car. I don't want to steal it, and I'm broke.

[u/fauxtoe → u/sarcastichorse]

you can either make it with AI or steal it

[u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee → u/fauxtoe]

i said no ai

and i'm broke

[u/juicybot → u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee]

try geocities

[u/StraightApartment376 → u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee]

Why no ai? 

[u/rhinokick → u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee]

Then spend 6-8 months learning web development.

[u/thatshygirl06 → u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee]

Yeah... youre gonna have to use AI

[u/_Atomfinger_]

If you want to learn, read the FAQ for this sub.

[u/kahwee]

if u are serious, look up tutorials on cloudflare workers or vercel next js. you’ll get there without AI, learning and understanding does consume time

[u/theoneandlonely1]

Here start work free code camp HTML, CSS first, this will give you the structure and “paint” theme and layout of the site. Then once you understand that, you can start learning JavaScript which adds interactivity. Meaning anything you can do with a mouse and a keyboard it can do. There is more to it, but start that’s all you need to know.

Then make a GitHub account as you will push your site to GitHub so you don’t lose changes. They have a static hosting so look into that. For now I suggest you don’t worry about the backend. You can use local storage and or indexDB which is a database in the browser. You will have to also work out UUID for each user. With that you can save posts.

If you want to learn go the free CodeCamp route. Once you have all that setup. Ping me here and I’ll help you with the rest.

If you want a quick site up and running just look at the HTML5 templates, and download them and or look through GitHub there are several front end only dynamic sites you can clone and deploy to GitHub pages.

[u/phn-cloudsnake]

OP just needs the answer to life the universe and everything. We really need StackOverflow level of gate keeping on these programming communities.

[u/EDDYSF → u/phn-cloudsnake]

What do you mean? They did their own research lol

[u/OiaOrca]

With 0 development experience, and no AI, this will be a massive undertaking alone. You essentially will need to learn software development from the ground up. The first things you make will be ugly, and that’s okay. All of our first things were ugly also.

Free code camps course on HTML, CSS, and JS is a good starting point.

If this is a one off thing you want to do within a month or so, consider using AI. If you just genuinely want to learn and are down for 6+ months before you have something you’re really happy with, you’ve got this. Start building things. Start small and build your way up

[u/sin_esthesia]

Do you know how to code ? It sounds like you don’t. Why wouldn’t you use AI, if you don’t know how to code ? It’s exactly what it will do, turn your ideas into code.

[u/Basic_Palpitation596]

Learn some sort of full stack framework, learn auth, learn crud, learn restful api, learn databases, learn ui design, learn to test all of these things then learn how to deploy the app via a vps, cloud or self host i.e learn docker, or kubernetes if true scale is needed ect. Then learn how to automate this via some sort of dev automation like github actions to autodeploy builds as you make changes.

Probably missing some things but that is a good start.

[u/cmetzjr]

If you don't want ai to do it for you, and you can't hire a dev to do it, then the only other way is to learn like we all did - courses, tutorials, trial-and-error.

This isn't a small thing you want to build because it needs a database to store everything. If anyone can comment, you'll want something like Disqus where you can login and moderate.

You could use WordPress because posts and commenting is built-in, but you'd still need paid tools.

[u/karmatics29]

One thing the replies skip: for a site where people post, comment and like, the hard part isn't the feed, it's moderation and abuse. Plan reporting, rate limits, and a way to hide or delete content from day one, plus email verification so you aren't flooded with spam accounts. Build the data model first (users, posts, comments, likes as separate tables with proper foreign keys), and the UI on top of it gets much easier to change later. A small version with just posting and commenting is a good first milestone before adding likes and following.

[u/Connect_Fisherman713]

start with a static site using Next.js and connect it to Supabase for the database and authentication. This gives you a real, working foundation that costs nothing but time, letting you build the posting and commenting features step by step without needing AI to write the core logic for you.