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 dropping the act
The real problem wasn't the tech stack. It was the blank content block on the homepage.
For years, I'd positioned myself as a specialist. I picked an industry, wrote the copy to match, and tried to sound like a bigger operation than I actually was. It worked well enough, but every time I sat down to update the site, something felt off. I was writing for a version of myself that didn't quite exist.
This rebuild forced me to be honest about what I actually do. I'm one person. I've been building websites for over twenty years. I work with all sorts of businesses, not just one sector. Once I stopped trying to fit myself into a niche that looked good on paper and started writing like the generalist I've always been, the content almost wrote itself. The blog topics became obvious. The services made sense. Even the contact form got easier to design when I stopped overthinking who'd be filling it in.
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.