A personal website: what to put in it
Good personal website design is mostly a matter of deciding what goes in and what stays out. Before colours or layout, answer one question: what should a stranger know about you after a minute on the page?
What is the site for?
A personal site can help you get hired, win clients, sell a course or simply give your name a proper home. Each purpose changes what belongs on it. Pick the main one and let it decide the order of everything else. A site that tries to serve an employer, a client and a reader of your blog equally usually serves none of them well.
What goes at the top?
Your name, what you do in plain words, and who you do it for. A clear photo of you helps more than an illustration, because people came to meet a person. Then one obvious next step: see the work, book a call, send a message. If a visitor has to scroll to find out whether you are a photographer or an accountant, the top has failed.
How much of my story should I tell?
Enough to explain why you are good at this, and no more. A short paragraph about where you started, what you have focused on and what you do now is plenty for the first screen of your story. The full history, with every job and every certificate, can live lower down or on its own page for the few who want it.
What counts as proof?
Work you can show, in whatever form your field allows: projects, articles, talks, recordings, a description of the kinds of clients you serve. Use only what is real and what you are allowed to share. If your work is confidential, describe the problem and your part in it without the name. One example explained well tells a visitor more than a long list of titles.
What should I leave out?
Anything you would not want to explain in a meeting. Skill bars that rate you out of ten, a wall of logos for tools everyone uses, hobbies that say nothing about your work, and old projects you have outgrown. Also leave out sections you cannot fill yet. An empty blog or a testimonials block with placeholder text takes away more trust than it adds.
How should people reach me?
Offer the channel you actually answer. For many people that is WhatsApp or email; a form is fine if someone reads what it sends. Put the contact step at the end of every page, not only on a contact page. And say what happens next, such as when you usually reply, so the visitor is not left wondering whether the message arrived.
How I handle it
I start a personal site from your answers to these questions, not from a template. The pages are drawn in Figma and you approve them before the build. The site is then built so that you can change the text, swap the photo and add new work from the dashboard without me. Support runs for 180 days from the day it goes live. Tell me what you do and what you want a visitor to do, and I will suggest the structure.
New articles every day on our Facebook page: Learn with MK
Have a project in mind?
Tell me what you are building and I reply within 24 hours.
