
Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites? - orbOfOrthanc
I&#x27;m looking in particular at sites that advertise consultancy services &#x2F; personal branding etc.  The more minimalist the better!
======
gwern
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&query=minimalist%20website&sort=byPopularity&type=all)
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=ask%20personal%20website%20website&sort=byPopularity&type=all)

I have a Twitter thread where people have made a number of suggestions (
[https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1092221945427517440](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](https://www.gwern.net/About#design)

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
cyberjunkie
Ha ha! Thank you.

------
crote
In my opinion, one of the best websites is brandur's
([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brandur](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](https://www.brandur.org/sortsupport-inet)

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

------
ReDeiPirati
Imho this is seriously amazing:
[https://dynamicwebpaige.github.io/info/](https://dynamicwebpaige.github.io/info/)

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

Still, I like the style

~~~
tendencydriven
What's strange about hosting on github?

------
berberous
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/](https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this-website/)

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

------
gtf21
I really like [https://gwern.net](https://gwern.net).

When I built my own site ([https://www.gtf.io](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.

------
dredmorbius
[https://www.gwern.net](https://www.gwern.net)

~~~
orbOfOrthanc
This literally looks like LaTeX

~~~
gwern
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](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.

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

------
Klonoar
I’m fairly proud of mine: [https://rymc.io](https://rymc.io)

The mobile reading is especially smooth, a point of pride

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

Are you using a static site generator?

~~~
Klonoar
Yup! It's a customized version of Zola
([https://www.getzola.org](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](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_

------
giancarlostoro
I really liked Joe Armstrongs GitHub blog here:

[https://joearms.github.io/](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.

------
pcmaffey
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](https://www.pcmaffey.com)

------
stankot
I really love this one: [https://tobiasahlin.com/](https://tobiasahlin.com/)

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

And of course, Daring Fireball:
[https://daringfireball.net/](https://daringfireball.net/)

------
mattkevan
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](https://www.kevan.tv)

------
aPoCoMiLogin
my personal favorite: [https://bruno-simon.com/](https://bruno-simon.com/)

(FYI: i'm not the author)

~~~
mattbgates
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.

------
0xkalle
I don't know if a designer would say, that it's well designed, but I am quite
happy with [https://kalle.co](https://kalle.co) . No blog, just a small
landing page with links to social profiles.

~~~
2mylesaway
minimalism at its finest. good job!

[https://myles.works](https://myles.works)

------
lornemalvo
[https://strml.net](https://strml.net)

~~~
adventured
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](http://strml.net) fixed it on the redirect to
[https://www.strml.net](https://www.strml.net) (which is using a Letsencrypt
cert for www.strml.net)

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

------
mattbgates
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](https://cdnjs.com/libraries/topcoat)

Adopted to my website:
[https://notetoservices.com/](https://notetoservices.com/)

------
lukaszkups
I've just recently redesigned my website and I really like it:
[https://lukaszkups.net/](https://lukaszkups.net/)

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

------
rasikjain
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](https://www.rasikjain.com)

------
smarri
Sam Esmail's

[https://www.esmailcorp.com/](https://www.esmailcorp.com/)

------
etherio
[https://igma.im](https://igma.im) is quite nice [https://bruno-
simon.com](https://bruno-simon.com)
[http://www.y78.fr/2/](http://www.y78.fr/2/)

------
sdan
I really like [https://distill.pub](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](https://sdan.io/blog)

------
deepaksurti
[https://www.michaelfogleman.com](https://www.michaelfogleman.com), discussed
on HN [1]

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

------
drinchev
I like mine :D

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

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

------
evaneykelen
[https://www.msgtrail.com/](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.

------
hugolundin
I really like [http://notes.eatonphil.com/](http://notes.eatonphil.com/) and
[http://neil.computer](http://neil.computer).

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

------
Datenstrom
I really like
[https://www.patternsinthevoid.net/](https://www.patternsinthevoid.net/)

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

------
mdrachuk
Does mine counts?

[https://drach.uk](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.

~~~
aljmyl
Really like this one

~~~
mdrachuk
Thanks.

------
owens99
Alternative question: really fast and SEO optimized personal sites?

~~~
giancarlostoro
[https://pasztor.at/blog/building-your-own-
cdn](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.

~~~
sdan
Or you can build your own CDN with Cloudflare Workers:
[https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/tutorials/configur...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/tutorials/configure-
your-cdn/)

Did it with [https://sdan.io/cdn](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](http://sdan.cc/gradient.jpg) (may be a bit
slow... it's 1MB)

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

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

------
huehehue
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.

~~~
adiabatty
Off the top of my head:

[http://www.stroustrup.com/](http://www.stroustrup.com/)

[http://danluu.com/](http://danluu.com/)

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

[https://vks.ai/](https://vks.ai/)

~~~
2mylesaway
clean but cookie cutter.

------
nojvek
Shameless plug. [https://nojvek.com](https://nojvek.com)

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

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

[https://thomasbrittain.com](https://thomasbrittain.com)

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

[https://sdan.io/surya](https://sdan.io/surya)

------
2mylesaway
[https://myles.works](https://myles.works)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
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.

------
lettergram
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/](https://austingwalters.com/)

------
alphydan
html only [https://alvarofeito.com/](https://alvarofeito.com/)

------
112012123
[http://glenweyl.com/](http://glenweyl.com/)

~~~
orbOfOrthanc
Hmmmm Wordpress...

~~~
qwerty456127
With Wordpress you can buy a cool design in a supermarket.

~~~
Havoc
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

~~~
qwerty456127
Indeed.

------
void_nill
my personal site:
[https://alligatorbrowser.github.io/index.html](https://alligatorbrowser.github.io/index.html)

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

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

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

------
nprz
-

~~~
orbOfOrthanc
Looks a little broken on my iPhone XS (13.2.3)

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

