February 12, 2025 4 min read
What a personal site is for
Not traffic, not leads, not a funnel. A place that is yours, which is a rarer thing than it was.
Every few years someone writes the post about how personal sites are dead, and every few years a few thousand people quietly launch one anyway. Mine has existed in some form since 2013. It has never brought me a client, and I would be hard pressed to tell you how many people read it.
I would rebuild it again tomorrow.
The three things it actually does
It is an index. When somebody asks what I have worked on, there is one URL, it is current, and it does not require them to have an account anywhere. That sounds trivial until you have watched a platform lose a decade of someone's work in an afternoon.
It is a forcing function. Writing something down for a page with your name at the top is a different activity from thinking about it. About half of what I believe about interface work, I found out I believed while trying to finish a sentence about it.
It is a place to have taste in public. Not a portfolio piece — the site itself. Every choice here is one I would defend: the three greys, the absence of an accent colour, the single moment of motion. Nobody briefed any of it. That is rarer in a career than it sounds.
What it is not for
It is not for traffic. There is no analytics script on this page. I do not know how many people are reading this and knowing would change what I wrote, which is the whole argument against knowing.
It is not for completeness either. Half the work I have done is not here, either because it is dull or because it is under someone else's name. A site that lists everything is a CV. A site that lists the good parts is a point of view.
Build the small one
The most common way a personal site dies is that its owner planned a big one. A tag system, a reading list, a now page that updates automatically, a redesign first. Six months later there is a repository with three commits and no site.
Write the four pages. Publish them badly. The version you are embarrassed by, on the internet, is worth more than the perfect one on your laptop — and unlike almost everything else you will build this year, it will still be yours in ten years.