You don’t need to over-engineer your personal website
I can’t believe I’m saying this as a web developer and designer, but I made this site using Squarespace. For many years, I’ve explored building sites using Jekyll, Gitpages, Gatsby + Contentful, Eleventy, Vercel, and some other light weight site generators. As much as I love the creative freedom and not to mention the money saved using these generators. I want to highlight some reasons why it may be a good idea to optimize your time and focus on other aspects that are important to you.
The JAMstack Trap
JAMstack was supposed to make the web faster, simpler, and more modular. And for a while, it did and still do. Static generation, headless CMSs, deploy previews that changed how we build at scale.
But the key word there is scale. My personal site doesn’t need to scale. It’s not serving thousands of users across continents. It’s a quiet corner of the internet for my ideas, work, and story. I just need a space to let the work I’ve done speak for itself.
Yet somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that even a one-page portfolio needed:
Continuous deployment
TypeScript configs
API routes for fetching blog posts
Lighthouse audits and analytics dashboards
We turned self-expression into a DevOps exercise. Your website shouldn’t require npm audit fix just to tell the world who you are.
The Performance of Professionalism
Developers, myself included, fell for the illusion that a complex stack signals sophistication. That if your portfolio runs on the latest framework, it must mean you know what you’re doing.
But truthfully, what most of us want is not a showcase of our tooling, but a place to think out loud.
A space to publish something imperfect.
A home for your creative trail — not another side project with a backlog.
The irony is that the more powerful your setup becomes, the less likely you are to actually use it. The friction grows. You hesitate to write because the build broke or your Markdown parser changed. Complexity quietly kills creativity.
Simplicity Is a Creative Choice
I used to think a developer’s worth was reflected in the tech behind their site or how stunning their site looked. Now I think it’s reflected in how often they share something. Simplicity isn’t regression — it’s freedom. When you stop maintaining a stack, you start maintaining a voice.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting polish and structure. But you don’t need a full design system to publish a thought. You don’t need a component library to introduce yourself. You just need a surface that lets you focus on the work itself.
First website in 2014 - Gitpages
Second website in 2018 - Gatsby & Contentful
You can see I have a particular look and feel - black & white, grayscale with a touch of expression in typography and imagery. My message and presentation of identity became more clear as the years went by and so did what I want in the components I needed to display my work. But I grew to understanding that the work under the hood is completely unnecessary for me on a small scale.
Issues:
Resolving security vulnerability flags
Removing deprecated and incompatible plugins
Building components from scratch or installing reusable component libraries to save time
Resolving potential deployment issues with Netlify and CI/CD pipeline
Throughout my career I would find myself refining the site to not only just fix bugs but to make sure the site was ready for potential recruiters to see it. I found myself losing time in fixing things and making sure everything looked great instead of showcasing.
What matters most
There is a plethora of ways to build a website. Part of our skillset as web developers and design engineers is to properly assess the right tools needed to solve a problem. Your personal website is not a problem that needs to be solved — it’s a place to be yourself. Whether you are new or experienced finding the simplest way to showcase your work is the best approach. Picking a CMS like Squarespace works for me because I have experience in customization of the templates and CSS. It also covers things that are important for me right now:
SEO and marketing tools are built in already
Blogging is scalable whenever I choose
The Squarespace community of developers have created so many amazing layouts to choose from even though the CMS itself has so many layouts to choose from
Monetization tools are secure and built in
No CI/CD pipelines, builds, or custom components to build from scratch
There’s other options like Framer, Notion + Super.so, Typedream, Cargo, and Popsy. Whatever you decide choose the platform that you know you will be the simplest to share your thoughts and ideas. Leave the developing to a repository on your Github and prototyping on Codepen or something where people can really see how you think.