A Field Guide to Personal Sites
Notes on building the kind of website you actually want to visit yourself.
After ten years of building personal websites I have stopped trying to make them impressive and started trying to make them honest. Here is the rough shape of what I now reach for.
Make it small
A personal site does not need a search bar, a newsletter pop-up, a cookie banner, or three columns. It needs a list of things you wrote and a way to read each one. That is roughly it.
Make it slow
Publishing on your own schedule — once a month, once a season — is a feature, not a failure. The web rewards consistency over frequency, and a quiet site that has been updated for ten years is more valuable than a loud one that lasted six months.
A blog is a long argument with yourself. The longer it runs, the more interesting it becomes — to you, and eventually to a small handful of other people.
Make it yours
Use a typeface you actually like. Pick a color you would put on a wall. Write about whatever you are reading this week. The point of a personal site is that it is a place where you do not have to be anyone in particular.