I just redesigned my personal site. New colors, a simpler page structure, a homepage that reads as one continuous scroll instead of a set of separate stops. On the surface, that’s the whole story.
It isn’t. The change that actually mattered was what I deleted.
The Page That Looked Right and Wasn’t
The old site had an offering page. Four services, Architecture, Backend Development, iOS Development, CI/CD Audits, each with its own short pitch and a link to book the work. On paper, that’s exactly what a site meant to build freelance credibility should have. A clear menu of what I do, ready to convert a visitor into a client.
I removed it entirely.
A page like that reads as generic the moment you actually look at it. Four services with a booking link is a template anyone could paste onto their own site with different words in the same slots. It doesn’t demonstrate judgment, or taste, or the ability to make a real tradeoff under real constraints. It just states availability, and availability isn’t the thing anyone is actually evaluating when they’re deciding whether to hire someone.
The real case for that has to live somewhere else: in the writing itself, and in the projects sitting right next to where that page used to be. A sales page competing for attention next to that evidence was diluting it, not supporting it. Cutting something that looked useful because it wasn’t actually earning its place is the same discipline I’ve written about before in How I Decide What Not to Build, just applied to my own site instead of someone else’s codebase.
Fewer Stops, Not Just Fewer Pages
The about page went the same way, folded into the homepage as one continuous scroll rather than a separate page a visitor has to decide to click into. Fewer places to have to choose to keep going. One story, told once, from top to bottom.
Renaming Without Moving Anything
Blog became Takes. Portfolio became Catalog. “Catalog, Or What I’ve Created” is the actual label now, a deliberately mixed construction, not a typo that slipped through review.
The URLs underneath didn’t move. /blog/ and /portfolio/ are still the real paths, only the on-page labels changed. Renaming the paths to match would have meant proper redirects and real SEO risk for a change that’s purely cosmetic. That’s not a limitation I’m working around, it’s the same restraint I’d apply to any other system: change what needs to change, and leave the rest alone.
The Part People Will Actually Notice First
The new visual identity is two accent colors, a muted periwinkle blue and a dusty rose, against a near-black base, with a generated header image in both light and dark mode. Restrained on purpose. It’s the part a visitor will notice in the first three seconds, and it’s the part that mattered least to actually get right.
What the Redesign Was Actually About
None of the visual work was the hard decision. The hard decision was looking at a page that seemed like exactly the right thing for a credibility-building site to have, and removing it anyway, because looking like the right thing and actually doing the work of the site are not the same, and only one of them was worth keeping.
