Ask HN: What makes a great personal website?
I'm getting ready to make a new personal site and wanted to grab some opinions from the HN community as to what makes a great personal website.
What's the one or two things you look for when exploring a new personal site? Feel free to mention your own personal website or portfolio site as well as other personal sites you find noteworthy. Depends what you want to make. A personal site is just that; personal. No one can really say you're wrong to build it a certain way or say it shouldn't be too simple/fancy. If I had to give any advice though, it'd be to think about what you want your personal site to do or demonstrate. Do you want to list your blog posts/articles/essays? Then maybe consider something a bit simpler in terms of design, with a focus on readability and loading times. Are you a designer/artist who wants to show off their skills? Then you'll probably want a fancier looking site with pictures/videos/demos of your work front and centre, like a portfolio. And if you're a programmer/software engineer who wants to demonstrate that, go all out with the fancy tech and use your HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills to make something flashy. Remember seeing a developer portfolio/personal site posted here before which played out like a 2D platformer level, which was quite interesting. Either way, it's your site, and the target audience/purpose of said site matters. Style and storytelling. Style: Is the site intentionally designed? Storytelling: Does the site communicate its purpose (or lack thereof) well? I’ve been cataloging a bunch of personal sites (300+) if helpful here: https://www.are.na/tmm/personal-sites-iouu5rp4cra My site is at https://meagher.co. Happy to chat about this subject further - email in bio. - Optimize your images. If you're gonna go down the tedious "hero image" road, DON'T make visitors download 10-meg background images. - Build it with simple HTML & CSS. JS should not be necessary. > JS should not be necessary. This x1000. However, not using JS is also not necessary. There are valid reasons to use JS even in a simple personal site. The way I see it, keeping it as simple as possible is most important. Much of the time that means HTML & CSS only, maybe however, you want to have tabs at the top (for example). Is this possible to do with HTML & CSS? Yes. Is it simpler to do with JS. Also yes, and it doesn't take hardly any to do. There are certainly valid reasons to use JS, and it can greatly enhance a site if done right - interactive examples in a blogpost is one of my goto examples where JS can enhance things a lot. Same with comment systems that allow you to see a real-time rendering of what you are writting. It mostly depends on who you're aiming the website at. Recruiters? Researchers? Conference organizers? People who use your software? Those will all be looking for different things so make sure to show exactly what they want to see. I took an extremely minimal approach: Single page, text-only, no CSS, just a short introduction and contact info. The page is PGP signed and includes a tiny easter egg that a techie might notice but is inconspicuous enough to everyone else (I really tried not to make it seem pretentious lol) - it's all about "show, don't tell". https://besa.uber.space/ Really depends; some people have personal sites all about a specific niche. If I have no interest in that area then it shouldn't be interesting, but oftentimes the passion comes across and the sheer enthusiasm makes it interesting. Mostly I click on random "personal" sites either because I want to learn about that specific individual, or because of a google-search. So I'd say it would be nice to see a picture, or have an "overview" or "about Bob" page, to give a little summary. But at the end of the day you decide what you want to write, share, post, or create. For what its worth my own site has some mixed content, but generally it's about software, security, and making my own hardware. https://steve.fi/ Meta: Make sure to check out the ton of previous threads about blogs people like or personal sites. Clean design. Clear and thoughtful writing. For some inspiration, have a look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23626929 A great personal site is the one that follows one or a couple of themes (or at least vaguely related themes), isn't too opinionated on the subjects it covers, gets updated regularly, has easy navigation, subscription feed (even if it isn't a blog), is readable without js.
Having a differently designed - memorable website is good but it shouldn't be at the expense of usability. Make it yours. Don't copy others, in style or content. Be passionate about it. If you left one thing behind on this earth make it your website. It's your digital personality. Fill it full of fun stuff that gives you joy. Don't make it for other people, don't go chasing [waterfalls] visitors. The same thing I value in any other site: interesting content. Secondarily, and required to make it a great site, would be speed (I should be able to start reading in at most 0.2 seconds from load in an ideal case) and internal links so that I can easily find more of the great content.