A new essay argues that a website does not need to be conventionally beautiful to be good. The writer’s point is not that design standards should disappear, but that a personal site should reveal the hand of the person who made it. In the essay, he compares website making to art on a fridge, bread baking and other tasks where the value lies partly in the fact that somebody chose to do the work themselves.
The first half of the piece is almost a defense of whimsy. The author says he does not want a generic site made by someone with better taste, because then the page would stop being his. What he wants is a place where the structure, jokes and odd decisions all point back to his own habits. That impulse, he says, is what pulls him toward humor, systems, structure and software, and why the page became a canvas for the kind of chaos he could justify only by making it himself.
That philosophy shows up in the mechanics of the layout. The essay describes a move away from plain simplicity toward a more horizontal, layered, sometimes unruly arrangement. Links vary in shape and spacing; whitespace is treated as part of the composition rather than as an empty gap to be minimized. The author says he used flex wrapping, border variations and small surprises to keep the page from sliding into sterile sameness. He even mentions choosing coprime integers at one point to drive variation, then deciding he liked the subtle repetition that resulted.
The site also refuses to rely on heavy scripting to create movement. The author says he wanted cursor interaction without JavaScript, so he built the effect with CSS alone. That fits the larger theme of the essay: a personal site should be playful, but the play should come from design choices rather than from a layer of unnecessary machinery. He also uses textured backgrounds created with css-doodle, which makes the page feel more like paper, dust or stars than a flat panel of pixels.
The result is an aesthetic of lived-in imperfection. In light mode, the dots become the look of dust on a page; in dark mode, they read as a night sky. The essay’s final point is that a website can keep changing because the person behind it keeps changing too. That is the opposite of the polished, static template many people settle for. The author is making a case for sites that feel provisional, personal and recognizably human, even when they are undeniably ugly by conventional standards.
The essay is also a reminder that personal sites can survive by being legible to their creators first. A page built from taste, memory and repeated experimentation may look messy to someone else, but that mess is what lets it age without becoming generic. The ugliness is a signature, not a flaw. The result is not polished in the conventional sense, but it is unmistakably personal.
