Who Still Needs a Personal Website
Writers don't. That's the difference.
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
I've written the same article a few times now. Personal websites are mostly over. Platforms handle the hosting, the design, the payments, the distribution. For a writer, your own site isn't necessary anymore. I still like having a personal website and it does have some unique aspects, but for most creators, it is not needed anymore.
There's an exception, though.
Developers.
This is the article about that exception.
Proof, not a homepage
For a writer & creator, a personal site is a homepage. But hardly anybody browses homepages anymore. Same goes for personal blogs. Mostly. With exceptions of course.
People rather scroll feeds, click recommendations, read in apps. So the writer builds a beautiful page, points to it, nobody clicks, and goes back to publishing on Substack. I do that too.
A developer's site is not a homepage. It's a work sample.
For a developer, the website isn't where you point people. Not just that. It's the thing you're being judged on, often.
A writer shows their writing somewhere else. A developer's "somewhere else" is the site itself, running, in a browser, doing what they said they could build.
The maintenance, the deploy, the little bugs you fixed at midnight. For a writer that's overhead. For a developer that's the point.
GitHub
"But I have a GitHub."
Sure. GitHub is the baseline now. Recruiters check it. Clients check it. If you write code and you're not there, that's the first problem to fix.
But a GitHub profile is a list of repos. Green squares, READMEs, commit history. It shows you show up. It doesn't show taste. Usually.
A personal site is where you frame the work. The one project you're proud of, front and center. The thing running live, not the repo. A screenshot that loads and a link that works. GitHub proves you code. The site proves you can decide what matters and put it first.
Those are different skills. The second one is the one people actually pay for.
Playground
There's a second reason, and writers don't get to use it. Building the site is itself the signal.
You pick a framework. You wire up a deploy pipeline. You connect a domain. You ship something small and real. That's a portfolio piece about building the portfolio. The medium is the message, and the message is "I can ship."
A writer building a website is often… procrastinating. Been there...
A developer building a website is working. In my eyes, at least.
It's also where you get to try the thing you can't try at your day job. A new framework. A weird animation. A stack you've been curious about. Low stakes, your own rules, and the result markets you while you learn.
Over-building
Now the catch.
Many portfolios are over-built. Someone spends three weekends on a Next.js site with scroll animations, a headless CMS, dark mode, particle effects, and a blog they will never post to. For five projects and one contact form. Been there too...
The site becomes the project that eats the time you'd spend on projects worth putting more effort into.
And the maintenance doesn't leave. Dependencies. The framework you picked two years ago wants updating. Your own site starts throwing build errors. This is why I tell writers to not build a website, and developers walk straight into it because building is fun and shipping the boring version isn't.
But ship the boring version first. A clean one-pager is still pretty cool. Who you are, three things you built with links that actually work, and how to reach you.
Hey, even put it on Carrd* to see how it goes. Done in a weekend, not a quarter.
The people looking at your site want to know if you can build their thing. Not whether your homepage has a custom cursor effect. Mine has...
The domain
The one thing worth owning here is the same thing I told writers to own. The domain.
yourname.dev. That's the asset. The site behind it is an implementation detail. It can be a one-pager today, a full portfolio next year, a redirect to your best project the year after. The URL stays. People may remember it.
I made this point about writers too, in the piece on why most of them don't need a website anymore. It holds harder for developers I feel like.
The Bottom Line
For a writer, the personal website is a nice-to-have option. It exists. Some still use it. Nobody really needs it.
For a developer, it's a cool part of the job and a showcase of the abilities. You don't point people somewhere else. You build the place they judge you by, and building it well is half the argument.
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