By Anthony McCloskey
Most personal websites eventually drift into one of two states.
Either they become a living, breathing machine with plugins, themes, dependencies, and dashboards, or they quietly decay until something breaks and nobody wants to touch it again.
I chose a third path: I hand craft my site.
Not because I am allergic to modern tooling. I have spent a career around complex systems. I use plenty of sophisticated platforms at work. But for my personal home on the internet, I want something different: simple, durable, fast, and trustworthy.
A hand built site is boring in the best possible way.
Plain HTML ages gracefully. A simple CSS file does not wake up one morning "end of life." You are not one abandoned plugin away from a security incident. You are not one framework update away from an all-weekend migration.
The goal is longevity. I want pages I can still edit years from now without needing to remember which version of which toolchain I used back in 2015.
As someone with a cybersecurity background, this part matters to me.
Every CMS, plugin, theme, build step, and third-party script adds potential failure points. That is not fearmongering, it is just how software works. More code, more dependencies, more places for vulnerabilities to hide.
A handcrafted site lets me keep the moving parts to a minimum. Fewer components. Fewer update emergencies. Fewer supply chain risks. More confidence that the site is doing exactly what it looks like it is doing.
Fast loading pages are a quiet form of respect.
Respect for your time. Respect for your battery. Respect for your bandwidth. Respect for the idea that you came here to read something, not to wait while a pile of scripts negotiates with ten different servers.
When a page is mostly text and images, it can be extremely quick. You click, it appears. That is the experience I want.
A lot of sites treat privacy like a compliance checkbox.
I treat it like a design constraint.
I do not want my site to be a tracking device. I do not want to outsource your visit to third-party ad tech or analytics scripts. Some sites explicitly commit to being ad-free and avoiding tracking entirely, because ads and trackers are both privacy and security risks. I agree with that philosophy.
So my goal is simple: your browser should not have to "phone home" to a dozen places just to read a page I wrote.
When you hand craft your site, you end up with a different relationship to it.
You know where everything is. You know what changed and why. You can make small edits without opening a dashboard or fighting a page builder. You are not negotiating with a template's opinions about how your content should look.
It is a digital version of keeping your tools sharp.
This website is my home base.
It is where I can share what I am learning, what I am building, and how I think about leadership, technology, and security. I want it to be stable, readable, and predictable.
Hand crafting it is not a nostalgic choice. It is a practical one.
Simple scales. Simple lasts. Simple is easier to secure.
And for a personal site, that is the whole game.
I welcome your thoughts and discussion on this topic!
Please feel free to email me your comments or questions.