..Hello world?

It took me a decade. A full decade of building websites for other people before I managed to build one for myself.

Not because I couldn't. I've built a website or two before. The problem more so was writing about myself, building something for myself all whilst trying to not cringe while doing it. But I'd always get a day or so where I was motivated and excited. Decide my brand was Scarlet red with midnight grey or something with a cool R as a logo…. build out half a homepage, maybe even get as far as an about page. Then I'd hit the part where I had to write about myself, stare at the screen for twenty minutes, type something that gave me the boak, get a top up dose of imposter syndrome and then just close it, to never be looked at again.

Thinking back, the designs were never right either. I'd spend time picking fonts and colours and layouts, trying to make something that felt like "me", and nothing ever did. Every portfolio template looks the same. Hero image, three service cards, a testimonial carousel, a contact form. It's fine for some people in my industry. It just never felt like mine though.

The Breakthrough

So the answer was pretty much sitting in front of me the entire time. I spend an admittedly unhealthy amount of my working life inside the WordPress admin dashboard. The sidebar, the admin bar, the little "Howdy" in the top right corner. It's the interface I'm most familiar with. Yeah. I ain't reinventing the wheel. Let's just go with this.

So the whole site is designed to look and feel like the WordPress admin panel. If you've ever managed a WordPress site, you'll recognise it immediately (I hope). If you haven't, it still works as a clean, functional layout. But for the people I actually collaborate with, people who have seen the dashboard of a wordpress site, it's a little knowing nod.

The Writing Problem

Building the site was the easy part once I settled on this. Writing the content however was still pretty rough.

I am not good at writing about myself. I find it deeply uncomfortable. Every sentence I wrote sounded like some kind of gross self praising LinkedIn post. "i CrAfT eNgAgInG dIgItAl ExPeRiEnCeS tHaT iNsPiRe TrUsT aNd DrIvE rEsUlTs". Yeah, No.

In the end I had to accept that the only way I was going to get the words right was to stop trying to sound impressive and just say what I actually do. I build websites. I look after them. I help organisations make good technical decisions. I get money and/or traffic flowing.

Overall, it turns out that writing about yourself is easy once you stop trying to sell yourself and embrace Claude to do most of the writing for you. You just have to be honest about what you do and trust that it's enough.

The Tech

For anyone who cares about the stack: it's Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS 4, deployed to Cloudflare Workers. The WordPress Dashicons are the real font file. The sidebar uses the actual WordPress icon character codes. The design tokens are pulled from WordPress core's CSS. The "Make it pink" plugin on the Plugins page actually works, even if it isn't a real plugin, but let's just pretend it is.. and yes, It will make the entire site pink.

Thinking back, I could have built this in WordPress. But I wanted to do something different over the weekend, so I built it in Next.js and it took a bit longer to do so. But it was a good excuse to get properly introduced to the stack I've been putting off playing with. It also gave me something to write about in the portfolio besides "I built another WordPress site."

What's Next for the blog

Honestly, I don't know. The site is live, the portfolio is written, and I've made my first and likely only blog post. If you're reading it, it worked, and that feels like enough for now.

Free advice if you're in a similar situation? Hmm.. If you've been putting off building your own portfolio or something, I get it. What worked for me is to just stop trying to design something original and start with something you already know. For me that was the WordPress dashboard. For you it might be something else entirely. But whatever it is, it'll likely feel more like yours than any template ever will.