I Rebuilt My Own Website. Here's What I Learned.
There's a running joke in web design that the worst website in any room belongs to the person who builds them for a living. I've been that person for longer than I'd like to admit.
My old site ran on WordPress. There's nothing wrong with WordPress, and I know it inside out. It always has and always will do what I need it to do. But I'd been staring at the same theme for years, tweaking things I didn't need to tweak, and ignoring the one question that actually mattered: who is this website for?
The easy decisions were technical
While I love WordPress, I wanted to do something differently this time, so I moved to Eleventy, a static site generator that turns markdown files into web pages. No database, no plugins to update, no logging in to check if something's broken. Hosting went to Netlify, which means I push code to GitHub and the site builds itself. I used Claude to help with some of the templating and content drafting, which saved a few evenings.
The whole thing loads faster, costs less, and I write blog posts in the same text editor I use for code. Every part of the technical rebuild went more smoothly than I expected.
And since the technical side was so easy, the content was going to be a breeze, right? RIGHT?
The hard part was finding my voice
The real problem wasn't the tech stack. It was the blank content block on the homepage.
Before this rebuild, I was trying to be three things at once. I sold development services to design agencies. I sold design and development to professional services firms. I built simple websites for local businesses. Three audiences, three pitches, and a homepage that tried to speak to all of them and ended up saying nothing to any of them.
I'd write a headline, hate it, delete it, write another one. For hours. Not because the words were wrong, but because I hadn't decided who I was talking to.
The rebuild forced the question. You can't write a homepage until you know who's going to read it. Once I committed to working with solicitors and professional services firms, the content almost wrote itself. The blog topics became obvious. The services made sense. Even the contact form got easier to design when I knew who'd be filling it in.
And it doesn't matter that I don't speak to local businesses anymore. If someone local wants a website, chances are one of my friends or clients will refer them to me directly. The same goes for agencies. I already work with a couple of fantastic agencies, and that's enough.
What I actually learned
I tell clients this all the time: the website isn't the hard part. Knowing what to say is. Knowing who you're saying it to is harder still. It turns out that advice is much easier to give than to follow. That's also why I recommend clients hire a copywriter to help them nail down their messaging.
The other thing I learned is that your own website is never finished. I'm still adjusting copy, still rethinking sections, still finding pages that don't quite work. But that's fine. A website that evolves with your thinking is better than one that sits untouched for three years because you're waiting for it to be perfect.
If your website has been sitting on your to-do list for as long as mine was, maybe it's time.