Create your first site

A new site takes about a minute. You need an account and a name.

1. Pick your subdomain

Your site lives at yourname.reocities.xyz. Names may use letters, numbers and hyphens. Choose carefully, because the subdomain is how people find and link to you.

2. Add an index page

Every site needs a file called index.html at its root. That is what visitors see when they open your address. The simplest possible version:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>My site</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello</h1>
    <p>This is my corner of the web.</p>
  </body>
</html>

The two halves of every page. The head describes the document, the body holds what people read.

Paste that into the file manager, save, and open your address. That is a published website.

3. Add style

Create style.css next to your index page and link it from the <head>:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">

Paths beginning with / are resolved from your site root, so they keep working no matter which page links to them.

4. Add more pages

A site is rarely one page. Create about.html alongside your index and link between them:

<a href="/about.html">About me</a>

Every page needs its own full HTML document, so the <!doctype>, <head> and <body> go in each one. There is no shared layout applied automatically, because there is no server-side templating. If that repetition starts to bother you, the usual fixes are to copy a skeleton file each time, or to build the shared parts with a small piece of JavaScript.

When something does not appear

Three problems account for almost every "my page is blank" report:

The file is not called index.html. Index.html, index.htm and index.HTML are all different names. The root page must be exactly index.html.
The path is wrong. href="style.css" resolves relative to the current page, so it breaks as soon as you link from a subfolder. href="/style.css" always resolves from your site root.
The browser cached the old version. A hard refresh (Ctrl+F5, or Cmd+Shift+R) fetches fresh files. This catches people constantly when editing CSS.

5. Fill in your profile

A short bio and a few tags make your site discoverable in Browse. Sites with no description are much harder for anyone to stumble across.