Websites

You are reading the sample

You are reading the sample

There is no portfolio page to visit. The work is the thing you are already looking at, on the device you are already holding.

A personal site is infrastructure rather than a brochure. It has to be built once, properly, and then actually run, which is the part almost nobody sells you.

Most professionals have an address they do not own. A profile on a platform that changes its layout, its reach and its rules without asking, and a contact form that delivers their enquiries through somebody else's free tier. It works until the day it does not, and the day it does not is never announced.

The alternative is not complicated. Your own domain, your own database, your own enquiries landing somewhere you can still read them in five years. A site drawn from the person rather than filled into a template, because a template makes you look like everybody else who bought it, which is the exact opposite of the point of a personal site.

Then somebody has to run it. A site that has not changed in two years says more about you than any sentence on it does. Search engines read that, and so do the people deciding whether to write to you.

I keep a team for this. Design, build, hosting, the security headers, the image pipeline, the backups, and the small changes that keep arriving. One team rather than one freelancer, so the person who built it is not the only person who understands it, and so a holiday is not an outage.

This site is the sample. Four services, a journal, an enquiry pipeline and a private admin behind it. So are the other two names in the portfolio. There is nothing to demonstrate that you are not already using.