Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

145 pointsby orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu93 comments

I'm looking in particular at sites that advertise consultancy services / personal branding etc. The more minimalist the better!

97 comments

gwern7 tahun yang lalu

This is a question which seems to come up regularly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I have a Twitter thread where people have made a number of suggestions ( https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1092221945427517440 ), and my own website is often mentioned - minimalist, fast, pretty, and also with a number of interesting & unusual features: https://www.gwern.net/About#design

gwern7 tahun yang lalu

Also of interest, since text usually means minimalist: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20998256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787816 )

markosaric7 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for all the links! I love exploring independent, personal websites (and adding them to my RSS reader).

danmostudco7 tahun yang lalu

I've been a big fan of Lee Robinson's website, which is built with Next.js: https://leerob.io/

* Stylistic enough to have some heart, but simple enough to not have the design get in the way

* Great content, his blog posts are a good mixture of technical and general thoughts

* I like his timeline on the about me page which provides some flavor to his experience.

As I was working on my personal site I was peeking into his github repo pretty consistently to see how he structured certain things.

nefitty7 tahun yang lalu

On this timeline I immediately tried to click the "Today" entry because it was blue. It didn't do anything.

cyberjunkie7 tahun yang lalu

No RSS on his blog. I like following people's blogs using a RSS feed reader.

leerob7 tahun yang lalu

That's a good suggestion. I'll look into that!

cyberjunkie7 tahun yang lalu

Ha ha! Thank you.

leerob7 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for sharing! I'm glad my site was helpful.

mattbgates7 tahun yang lalu

i love the idea of the timeline :)

crote7 tahun yang lalu

In my opinion, one of the best websites is brandur's (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brandur).

Not a huge fan of the homepage, but the articles look sublime. Example: https://www.brandur.org/sortsupport-inet

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

Damn. You’re quite right. Excellent typography and layout even on mobile. Thanks for sharing.

ReDeiPirati7 tahun yang lalu

Imho this is seriously amazing: https://dynamicwebpaige.github.io/info/

sdan7 tahun yang lalu

I like that email response time graph... thinking of doing that as well when I have time.

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

Hosting on GH; #weird-flex-but-ok

Still, I like the style

tendencydriven7 tahun yang lalu

What's strange about hosting on github?

berberous7 tahun yang lalu

I quite like the website of Paul Stamatiou, a designer at Twitter. It’s primarily a blog about his interests (photography, gear, etc), but I think the site itself is well done and helps advertise his skills. He just posted an article about the design of the site itself:

https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this-website/

mattbgates7 tahun yang lalu

Don't know what it is... but that site is beautiful. I think its like a "friendly" minimalism. The "pop of placement" perhaps.

gtf217 tahun yang lalu

I really like https://gwern.net.

When I built my own site (https://www.gtf.io), I tried to make it as "minimalist" as possible -- fast rendering (v little CSS, no JS, completely static). I wanted it to have no distractions whatsoever, I just wanted it to be readable.

Klonoar7 tahun yang lalu

I’m fairly proud of mine: https://rymc.io

The mobile reading is especially smooth, a point of pride

rudedogg7 tahun yang lalu

Looks beautiful, and loads quickly. This is my favorite so far.

Are you using a static site generator?

Klonoar7 tahun yang lalu

Yup! It's a customized version of Zola (https://www.getzola.org) that I hacked to add support for line numbers in code blocks (e.g, in any of the technical articles). I also committed support for the Dracula theme to the project.

The social stuff is a separate script that runs before site generation, which I open sourced (https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/activity-scraper). All runs on a "every 5 minutes" cron job that just fetches activity and rebuilds the site. It also rebuilds if I push to the server.

For the font support, the top logo is optimized to just include those four characters (RYMC), and then Aleo is stripped slightly. It's all base64 encoded into the CSS, and the CSS is all inlined into the page.

Before anybody says "but HTTP/2", yes, I know multiple requests on the page is fine with HTTP/2, and that's good for much bigger projects. I still notice a big time to paint difference for something like this where the total amount of data on the page is ~150kb. Icons are all SVGs, inlined into the page and just repeated via group/use tags - the only external request it makes is the header image, and I suppose Cloudflare injects an email decoder JS lib that's less than 1kb.

I think part of me also wanted to do it like this purely to ensure that there's tech articles out there that load fast, don't need AMP, and don't overload you with subscribe/follow/etc actions. It's old school, the web I grew up with - doesn't work for everything today and I wouldn't build most projects like it, but it's fun for my personal site. shrug

dredmorbius7 tahun yang lalu

https://www.gwern.net

[deleted]7 tahun yang lalu

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

This literally looks like LaTeX

gwern7 tahun yang lalu

You say that like it's a bad thing!

But the TeX math is interesting to discuss: it turns out that you can skip the usual multi-second download/parse/render/reflow workflow of MathJax JS libraries on a static website by preprocessing the final HTML pages using https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node . This gets you pretty much the best of all worlds: it renders instantly without JS, looks good, works cross-browser, and is dead-simple to set up as you just pipe into a tool. Definitely the best way I've found for static sites to render math.

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

For the flippant style of my comment, it actually wasn’t intended as an insult. I quite like your approach.

giancarlostoro7 tahun yang lalu

I really liked Joe Armstrongs GitHub blog here:

https://joearms.github.io/

He wanted something that would enable anybody to PR his Wiki and wasnt at the mercy of a server side static site generator engine since the GH one screwed up his links for his former blog. Its simple and works mostly on the client side and gives you an exportable file.

Armstrong passed away sometime back sadly and my hope is that GitHub maintains his blog undisturbed. He had a beautiful way of explaining concurrency and software issues that I think anybody could follow. Also for those unaware he was one of the creators of the Erlang programming language.

pcmaffey7 tahun yang lalu

I designed my home page as a thin homage to web server root index.html pages.

Though I'm most proud of my SMIL animations.

https://www.pcmaffey.com

aPoCoMiLogin7 tahun yang lalu

my personal favorite: https://bruno-simon.com/

(FYI: i'm not the author)

mattbgates7 tahun yang lalu

THIS WAS THE MOST AWESOME WEBSITE EVER. I'd love to hire that guy to do a galaxy one... traveling to different plants in a spaceship.

MrAlex947 tahun yang lalu

Very nice. Reminds me of the excitement of finding new websites years ago when the web felt like the wild west!

stankot7 tahun yang lalu

I really love this one: https://tobiasahlin.com/

Shameless self promotion (my blog): https://muffinman.io/

And of course, Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/

mattkevan7 tahun yang lalu

Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but I like mine. Minimal, with some lairy background graphics.

Built it on an iPad using Working Copy and Affinity Designer. Jekyll, Netlify and a good CDN means it’s free to run and super fast.

https://www.kevan.tv

0xkalle7 tahun yang lalu

I don't know if a designer would say, that it's well designed, but I am quite happy with https://kalle.co . No blog, just a small landing page with links to social profiles.

2mylesaway7 tahun yang lalu

minimalism at its finest. good job!

https://myles.works

lornemalvo7 tahun yang lalu

https://strml.net

adventured7 tahun yang lalu

Very well done, although it starts slow (thought it was going to be just the initial simple text).

Like others I had a problem with the page cert (GitHub cert). Going to http://strml.net fixed it on the redirect to https://www.strml.net (which is using a Letsencrypt cert for www.strml.net)

mattbgates7 tahun yang lalu

Love that adventured... bit long, but good.

baal80spam7 tahun yang lalu

I am getting:

Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

iamspoilt7 tahun yang lalu

This one is really cool! Never seen anything like this before.

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

Seems to be down :/

mattbgates7 tahun yang lalu

Quite subjective, we all are.

I saw this template on cdnjs and fell in love. What I had before this website was an awful portfolio type site that had links on the side and a slideshow with all the images and wasn't very mobile-friendly. I knew I needed to update it... and I am absolutely fascinated with minimalism.

If you want to use it, you can find it here: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/topcoat

Adopted to my website: https://notetoservices.com/

lukaszkups7 tahun yang lalu

I've just recently redesigned my website and I really like it: https://lukaszkups.net/

mendelmaleh7 tahun yang lalu

This one is super simple, and I really like its colors in dark mode: https://alexanderte.github.io/ This is mine, tried to keep it as simple as possible: https://mendel.sh/

rasikjain7 tahun yang lalu

I did tried different frameworks like gatsby, nextjs, hugo etc and finally settled with hugo static website for its community support and templates. it is minimalist with white background. Hosted on Netlify. working great so far.

Shameless plug: https://www.rasikjain.com

smarri7 tahun yang lalu

Sam Esmail's

https://www.esmailcorp.com/

etherio7 tahun yang lalu

https://igma.im is quite nice https://bruno-simon.com http://www.y78.fr/2/

sdan7 tahun yang lalu

I really like https://distill.pub 's design. Which is why I remastered it into a Ghost theme and put it on my blog: https://sdan.io/blog

deepaksurti7 tahun yang lalu

https://www.michaelfogleman.com, discussed on HN [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14445587

drinchev7 tahun yang lalu

I like mine :D

[1] https://www.drinchev.com

RMPR7 tahun yang lalu

A little bit late to the party but this one https://mayvaneday.art/ is pretty good of you're into the old internet stuff, it's even available on the darknet

evaneykelen7 tahun yang lalu

https://www.msgtrail.com/ is my personal blog. Spartan, easy to read on various screen sizes, auto darkmode, and client-side searching on the Archive page.

hugolundin7 tahun yang lalu

I really like http://notes.eatonphil.com/ and http://neil.computer.

gitgud7 tahun yang lalu

The first time I've seen the .computer TLD, interesting....

Datenstrom7 tahun yang lalu

I really like https://www.patternsinthevoid.net/

I have been meaning to redo my own to be more minimalist for a while now.

mdrachuk7 tahun yang lalu

Does mine counts?

https://drach.uk

It doesn’t really serve any purpose right now. I wanted the domain mostly for email. But I tried to put up something nice.

aljmyl7 tahun yang lalu

Really like this one

mdrachuk7 tahun yang lalu

Thanks.

owens997 tahun yang lalu

Alternative question: really fast and SEO optimized personal sites?

geerlingguy7 tahun yang lalu

I've gotten my site down to ~0.5s load time and rank for a number of tech SERPs, still get a few thousand visits from Google per day for 5-10 year old articles: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/

majewsky7 tahun yang lalu

SEO is overrated. Focus on high-quality content that people want to link to.

Case in point: I have a podcast (in German) whose name is a common German phrase ("Gar nicht so einfach", which translates to "Not that easy"). In SERPs for that phrase, the first few results are usually dictionaries, but my podcast's site (https://xyrillian.de/noises/gnse/) usually appears around 7th or 8th place still on the first page. This is without me doing any SEO, and in fact, without keeping up a regular schedule. >_> But the few episodes that there are have been reviewed overwhelmingly positively, and that appears to be all it takes.

giancarlostoro7 tahun yang lalu

https://pasztor.at/blog/building-your-own-cdn

This is a great one. Basically you want a CDN for fast. He also embeds the b64 of images as well.

sdan7 tahun yang lalu

Or you can build your own CDN with Cloudflare Workers: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/tutorials/configur...

Did it with https://sdan.io/cdn (I host a ton of files so my other websites can quickly access them) an example: http://sdan.cc/gradient.jpg (may be a bit slow... it's 1MB)

giancarlostoro7 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for the share, I didn't realize you could use Cloudflare workers for this too.

Havoc7 tahun yang lalu

Thats cool. Thanks

Terretta7 tahun yang lalu

giancarlostoro7 tahun yang lalu

I did like that it defaults to spying turned off.

sbmthakur7 tahun yang lalu

It will be great if you could start a seperate "Ask HN" thread for this.

gitgud7 tahun yang lalu

https://acko.net/ is a personal site I've always found to be impressive and memorable (not mine).

huehehue7 tahun yang lalu

I've seen a few that are just plain left-aligned HTML with basically no styling, and I think they're beautiful.

Does anyone know of any like that? I can't remember any offhand.

adiabatty7 tahun yang lalu

Off the top of my head:

http://www.stroustrup.com/

http://danluu.com/

kootenpv7 tahun yang lalu

I like mine for the fact that it is static and hosted on github pages with a not too bad design.

https://vks.ai/

2mylesaway7 tahun yang lalu

clean but cookie cutter.

nojvek7 tahun yang lalu

Shameless plug. https://nojvek.com

It’s a super simple site that I wanted to make minimal and mobile friendly.

TomBrittain7 tahun yang lalu

My personal website is minimal, but still very much a work in progress.

https://thomasbrittain.com

sdan7 tahun yang lalu

Added a gradient to spice what I wanted to be a plain website:

https://sdan.io/surya

[deleted]7 tahun yang lalu

2mylesaway7 tahun yang lalu

https://myles.works

RcouF1uZ4gsC7 tahun yang lalu

johndcook.com

The blog posts are amazing and I have learned so much from that. At the same time they have convinced me of Dr. Cook’s knowledge and if I was looking for a consultant in these matters, he would be at the top of my list.

lettergram7 tahun yang lalu

I have done lots of consulting and get a significant amount of traffic to my personal site.

I just used Wordpress, picked a minimalist theme, edited the theme to suite me, then added plugins to improve:

https://austingwalters.com/

[deleted]7 tahun yang lalu

alphydan7 tahun yang lalu

html only https://alvarofeito.com/

1120121237 tahun yang lalu

http://glenweyl.com/

qwerty4561277 tahun yang lalu

Is the site meant to be a joke? The bio under the name sounds like suggesting that.

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

Hmmmm Wordpress...

qwerty4561277 tahun yang lalu

With Wordpress you can buy a cool design in a supermarket.

Havoc7 tahun yang lalu

And then deal with their ecosystem of plugins that all try to sell you stuff.

Busy figuring out my own site and very certain that there will be no Wordpress involved

qwerty4561277 tahun yang lalu

Indeed.

void_nill7 tahun yang lalu

my personal site: https://alligatorbrowser.github.io/index.html

xwowsersx7 tahun yang lalu

I like the site, but the font, while cool, makes it hard to read. It's giving me a headache lol.

nkkollaw7 tahun yang lalu

Mine is pretty minimalistic, haven't updated it in a few years but people like it: http://www.nbrogi.com/

duelingjello7 tahun yang lalu

Contact info, GPG key, brief bio, links and a big QR code of its own link.

nprz7 tahun yang lalu

orbOfOrthanc7 tahun yang lalu

Looks a little broken on my iPhone XS (13.2.3)

[deleted]7 tahun yang lalu

geerlingguy7 tahun yang lalu

Same on iPad Pro with Safari; some elements cut off at the top after the animation runs.