I’m sitting here imagining people who’ve previously visited this website clicking on this link, sighing, and thinking to themselves “seriously, she made another layout change”? It’s a silly thing to worry about, given that this is my website and I’m free to make as many layout changes as I want – but here we are.
Ever since I returned to the personal web about a year ago or so, I’ve felt a certain amount of (entirely self-imposed) pressure to build “cute” or “creative” websites that eschew all modern web design conventions. There are so many websites in this space that are genuine works of art, and it’s hard not to feel inspired by them.1 The popular “websites that look like other things” trope is one I find particularly inspiring, but it always ends up at odds with my general preference for minimalist design.
I love looking at clean lines, open space, and tasteful accents. Even in my early days of web building, those were the designs I gravitated towards.2 I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m at my happiest and most-productive when my peripheral vision is free of clutter. An abundance of things in the background makes it hard for me to focus, and even makes me feel a little anxious.
My first two designs for this website could technically still be considered “minimal,” but they included extraneous elements intended to put a smile on other people’s faces – not on mine, necessarily. Those designs were well-received, and the positive feedback made me feel pretty good … but the longer I looked at my site while drafting posts I couldn’t finish, the less focused I felt. It took a while to figure out what was going on, but there’s no question about it: the design wasn’t completely working for me, and that was putting me off the site.
While browsing around Dead Simple Sites I came across a blog post about “Selfish Websites.” I won’t link to it, as I strongly suspect the text is LLM-polished and I don’t like to subject my visitors to artificially generated prose, but I’m sure you can find the article on your own steam if you really want to read it… The basic gist of the post is this: build for yourself first, because your website is something you use.
While I generally think it’s a good thing to build public spaces with others in mind, I do agree with the author (even if that author is in fact Cursor, Claude, or whatever) that there can be value in putting your own preferences first. No matter how popular your website ends up becoming, you will always be the one who spends the most time looking at it. If you can’t enjoy your own website, you’re probably not going to put as much time or effort into it as you otherwise might. We generally like tending to things we’re proud of; for this reason, I think that we should aim to inspire ourselves with our designs first and foremost. If we end up inspiring others in the process? That’s all gravy.
So with that in mind, I’ve taken an older minimal stylesheet of mine, freshened it up a bit, and made it the primary design for my website.
Some new features:
- A completely restructured home page that no longer features snippets of my recent posts; it is now a clean, simple hub that links to every major page on the site.
- Simplified navigation. An arrow at the top of each page sends you one level higher in the site’s structural tree. For instance, clicking the arrow on a blog post takes you to the blog archive, while clicking the same arrow on the archive takes you back to the home page. It’s kind of like a back button, but doesn’t function exactly like one. Hovering over the arrow will tell you exactly where the arrow is taking you.
- Less metadata on blog posts. My last design featured the date, tag/category, and word count below each post title. This often looked cluttered on mobile, so I got rid of the word count entirely and moved the category link to the bottom of each post (borrowed the latter from Bear Blog’s basic design).
- Images for my logs page. If you’re on desktop and viewing the page in a browser window that’s at least
1051pxwide, hovering over each link will display a small cover image for that particular title. The images are a little unnecessary, but I’ve implemented the feature in a way that makes me feel good when I look at it.
On the whole, this is easily my simplest design yet. It’s not completely devoid of all fun and whimsy, though … you may have already noticed the bizarre little creature floating above my footer text. It’s the earliest known illustration of a tardigrade or “water bear,” published in 1773 by Johann August Ephraim Goeze.
I’ve loved tardigrades ever since I first looked at one under a microscope in university. These little guys can survive extreme fluctuations in temperature and the vacuum of space – and, with any luck, they can also survive my frequent, capricious layout changes.
Footnotes
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I’m thinking specifically of gorgeous sites like Elle’s Homepage, ritual.sh, and Hellmouth. These sites are far more creative than anything I could ever come up with, and they’re an absolute treat to look at. ↩
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I’d provide receipts by posting a link to the Wayback Machine’s archive of my Harry Potter RPG circa the turn of the millennium, but teenage me was a total dumbass who posted her entire government name and location on the Internet. You’ll just have to take my word on it – that site was spartan by 2003 standards. ↩