Sophie Koonin began making websites on Geocities at the age of 10. Now she does it for a living. And this week she wrote a love letter to the personal site: "this page is under construction."
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web. A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) β I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it.
I want to like Bluesky, but to look at the investor list is to know we're digging the same grave we just climbed out of. And the others all have their own problems: Mastodon is complicated and hostile to network effects, Threads is part of Meta and hostile to network ecosystems, and they're all ultimately Twitter clones anyway. And the web is mostly homogenous too.
And these sites all look identical. The same style of icons, black CTAs, the same pops of the same colours. I keep landing on websites and thinking I'm looking at Vercel, and it's become this kind of bland VC-funded corporate identity that all startups have nowadays. And a lot of the content is similar too, because it ultimately comes down to what works for SEO. I gave this talk before Generative AI was quite so ubiquitous, and it's even worse now with so many websites full of absolute garbage content spewed out of ChatGPT, and nobody knows how Google ranks pages any more.
Instead, rediscover what is now a "decades-old art form." You don't have to be an artist to make art.
Previously:
β’ Random useful websites
β’ eink.link is a website directory for e-readers
β’ Brutalist websites
