April 24, 2026David Marin
What makes a good personal website in 2026
Personal sites are not resumes. They are trust compression tools. Notes on what works, what screams "AI-generated", and how to build one that earns the click.
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Personal sites are not resumes. They are trust compression tools. Notes on what works, what screams "AI-generated", and how to build one that earns the click.
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Employers read resumes. Clients read operator stories.
That is the one idea that keeps coming back every time I look at a personal website that works, and every time I look at one that does not. The resume is for filtering. The personal site is for trust compression: someone who has read a little about you, wants to know if you are for real, and will spend ninety seconds deciding. Your job is to compress ten years into those ninety seconds without lying.
Here is what I have settled on after rebuilding my own.
The opening line of every good personal site answers the question what are you actually working on this month? "Founder of Basetool. Building Sixthly in stealth." beats "Passionate about scalable systems and user-centric design." Nobody is hiring a passion. They are hiring a person who is currently shipping.
The nownownow.com convention formalizes this: a /now page, dated, listing three or four things. Low maintenance, high signal. It is the easiest way to prove a personal site is alive.
The next thing someone wants after the one-line intro is evidence. Not in the abstract. In specifics.
"Co-founded Avo, an open-source Rails admin framework still shipping at avohq.io." "Shipped at YC W21 startup Waydev." "IEEE SMC 2020 Best Paper." These are the things that let a stranger decide you are worth a call without reading your whole life story.
The trap here is the logo wall. Every SaaS template ships with a gray bar of client logos at 40% opacity, and every personal site that copies it ends up looking like a B2B landing page. Real operator sites lean typographic: metrics and names in monospace, arranged honestly, no decoration. See pmarca, paulgraham.com, brianlovin.com. Zero logos between them.
"Portfolio" is a designer word that leaked into engineering and should have stayed. What you want is case studies. Each one is the same shape: the problem you walked into, the approach you chose, the outcome with real numbers, a stack note. Four sections, five hundred words, linkable.
The link matters. When someone asks "what have you built?" you want to send one URL, not five. Case studies are optimized for being linked.
If you have NDAs, anonymize. "A European logistics company" is fine if the numbers are real. Nobody is impressed by a brand name; people are impressed by the claim "cut operational cost 25%" if they believe you.
A blog is not a place to announce things. It is a place to demonstrate how you think. Two or three posts with an opinion beat ten posts that summarize the news.
The question to ask for every post: would I have read this if a stranger wrote it? If no, do not publish. The failure mode of personal blogs is the assumption that being you makes the post interesting. It does not. The post has to earn the click on its own.
Pick topics you have earned the right to write about. Co-founding Avo lets me write about Rails developer tooling and the craft of building admin frameworks. It does not let me write about distributed systems at FAANG scale. Stay in your lane and the writing will be good.
Keep a PDF CV on the site. Someone will need it: a visa application, a press bio, a VC DDQ. Link it from the hero, small, secondary. It is not the main artifact. The site is the main artifact.
Everything ends with a call to action. One. Not "subscribe to my newsletter and book a call and follow me on X and read my book." Pick one. For a studio page, it is "book a call". For a portfolio, it is "see my work". For a landing page, it is "start a trial". The one you pick should be the thing that, if a visitor does it, your life gets better.
Embed a calendar. Make it three clicks at most. Do not hide behind a contact form.
The most recognizable AI-generated layout in 2026 is a three-column feature grid with an icon in a colored circle above each. It is everywhere because the AI tools default to it. Every time you see it on a personal site you think "this person used a template and did not edit it."
The other tells: purple-to-indigo gradient backgrounds, centered everything, uniform huge border radius on every element, decorative blobs, emoji as bullet points, hero copy that starts with "Welcome to..." or "Unlock the power of...". None of these survive a second glance.
What works instead: typography. Big headlines in a real typeface (ideally one you paid for). One accent color, used rarely. Body text at 18px. White space. Nothing that earns its place gets cut.
Lighthouse score of 95+ is not optional. The site loads before the user's thumb moves. No massive hero video, no lazy carousel, no marketing pixel soup. The site is not the marketing funnel, it is a document. Documents load fast.
Ship static. Use a CDN. The heaviest image should be your photo, and it should be under 100KB after next-gen format conversion.
Not a design decision, a respect decision. Most engineers read the internet in dark mode. If your personal site flashbangs at 11pm, they will close it and not come back.
CSS variables and a prefers-color-scheme override is about forty lines of code. Do it on the first day.
The final test I run on any personal site, mine or someone else's: show it to a friend for ten seconds, then take it away, and ask what they remember.
If the answer is "your name and that you run something called Basetool and something stealth called Sixthly", you succeeded. If the answer is "uh, it was dark and there were some boxes", start over.
The test assumes the reader is distracted. Because they are. Someone is deciding whether to book a call with you while their manager is on Slack and their toddler is yelling. Your site has to work in that context.
A short list I keep open when I need to recalibrate:
/now, /uses, writing-forward.None of these look alike. What they share: a clear sense of whose site it is, a trusted-first-sentence, concrete evidence, and one thing they want you to do next.
That is the whole shape.
If you are rebuilding your own, the code for this site is public. The case studies are a good reference for the narrative shape. If you would rather not rebuild yours and want someone who has done it, book a call.