A website for whatever you want it to be
Not every site is selling something. Some are a portfolio, a blog, your writing or photographs, a band, a community group, a side project. Platforms rent you a template; we build it properly once and hand you the code.
- Nothing built until you approve the design
- Live on your own domain
- Real code, yours to keep
What people are there to do
Sometimes they came to read something, sometimes to look at your work, sometimes to find out who you are before replying to your email. The site's job is to make that immediate, and then to be somewhere you actually enjoy putting things.
Read something you wrote, without fighting a pop-up
Look through your work, at full size
Work out who you are before replying to your email
Find the links, the contact, the thing you wanted found
What they type to find you
- [your name]
- [your name] portfolio
- personal website examples
- start a blog on my own domain
- squarespace alternative you own
Personal sites are not won in the map results. This traffic is your own name, the subject you write about, and links from the places you already are, so the site is built to be fast, readable and quotable, with the markup search engines and AI assistants need in order to attribute any of it to you.
Why most personal sites end up abandoned
Rented, forever
A template subscription is a few hundred a year for as long as the site exists, and the month you stop paying it disappears. Years of writing, hosted on someone else's terms.
A template thousands of people share
On a portfolio or a personal site the design is part of the point. A layout a visitor recognises from three other sites quietly undercuts the work it was meant to present.
Slow, for no good reason
A page of text and photographs should appear instantly. Builders ship megabytes of scripts to display a paragraph, and a blog nobody waits for is a blog nobody reads.
Locked in the day you want to leave
Exporting from most platforms hands you a bag of HTML that nobody can maintain. Your writing should outlive whichever company happened to be hosting it.
A site shaped the way you want it, then handed over
Hand-coded, not assembled from a template — so the layout can be shaped around what your customers came to do rather than around what a page builder allows.
Whatever the site actually is
A blog, a portfolio, one good page, a home for a project, a site for a band or a group. Describe it in the document you send us. There is no template deciding the shape in advance.
Writing that is easy to add
A new post is a file with your words in it, and the docs walk through adding one. No admin panel to log into, nothing to keep updated, nothing that quietly breaks in two years.
Built to be read
Real typography, a sensible line length, and pages that open immediately on a phone, which is very nearly the whole experience of a site made mostly of words.
Your work at full size
Photographs and images served properly rather than compressed into mush by an uploader, so a portfolio actually shows what you made.
Findable by your own name
Titles, descriptions, structured data and an author identity set up so that searching your name finds you, and so that being quoted credits you.
The code, in your hands
A repository that belongs to you and hosting you control. No monthly platform fee that has to be paid forever for your own writing to stay online.
Builds from $199. You approve the design before we build.
Questions personal sites and blogs ask
No. Most of what we build is for local businesses, but the process does not care what the site is for: a portfolio, blog, book page, community group or wedding site are the same job to a developer. Send the document describing what you want.
Yes. A post is a file containing your text, and the docs walk through adding one: no database, no logins, no plugin updates. On the managed plan, send us the writing and we put it up.
Over any real length of time, yes. A build starts at $199 once, against roughly $200 to $400 a year for a builder subscription, so it pays for itself in the first year or two. You hold a repository you own, not a subscription you must keep alive.
That is the normal starting point. Write down what the site is for, who it is for, and send links to two or three sites you like. That is enough for a developer to work from. You see the design before anything is built or paid for, so the risk of getting it wrong is ours.
Something not covered? Read the full FAQ or — chat is answered 24/7.
Websites for other trades
Ready to get started?
Send a doc and we hand-code it, or start from a kit and build it yourself
- Nothing built until you approve the design
- Live on your own domain
- Real code, yours to keep