The Right Personal Website

Manuel Moreale on personal websites:

Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.

Just as there are no rules for blogging, there are no rules for the personal website. Go with your gut and build a site you love. And if you don’t like it anymore in six months, make a different version of your site.

The beauty of personal projects is that no marketing manager prescribes your site’s content. There’s no design director who sends frantic messages at 6:34 on Friday because you deviated from the company-approved design system. And there’s no opinionated engineering manager who you have to fight when you feel like rewriting the backend in a new language.

The only reason we’re having these arguments is because everything we do online is now commodified, thanks to the relentless barrage of mind-numbing bullshit from online personas grasping for attention. But think about it this way: If someone judges you based on a something you made for yourself, is it worth keeping their company?