What’s the story my front page tells?

Last week, V.H. Belvadi wrote about the homepage quandary, stating

In my humble opinion the single most difficult part of a personal website to design properly is the homepage. This is especially true when your website is not limited to a single showcase. Programmers writing about code might simply list their latest work; artists and photographers might provide a grid of their projects straightaway; people who rarely update their website might treat it as a business card. These come with their own challenges but one challenge they do not face is what to put on their home page: quite simply their content dictates this.

I totally agree with his statement.

For a generalist like me, it’s definitely a difficult task.

General wisdom is that you want to have tight focus and preferably one “call to action”, i.e what you want the reader to do. But that’s all business-jargony and as much as I am a generalist with multiple interests, the visitors to my site come from a wide variety of people, interested in different things.

Some might say that’s a problematic situation and I worried about it for my fair share in the past but then I embraced the fact that I don’t have to write and build for a niche (I’ll link to Rach Smith’s great To be whole is the goal and recommend also reading Nat Eliason’s Be yourself, not a niche on the topic).

So I split my front page into “cards”, all sharing one aspect, sub page or project.

At the time of writing, this includes:

• “hero section” with a short introduction to who I am and links to my social accounts
• a testimonial video I hired a video production company to do where they interviewed 6 wonderful human beings I’ve had the pleasure to work with
• my latest blog post
• my digital garden
• my From Juhis with Love newsletter
• most recent Advent of Code solutions
• my older Syntax Error newsletter
• my Potluck playing cards design project
• my now mostly outdated Weeklies
• Turku ❤️ Frontend community
• archipylago Python community
• developer community show Codebase
• Pokemon TCG digital toolkit
• conference/meetup speaker stuff
• Helsinki Dev Lunch that I used to run
• Dev Breakfast Newsletter I used to run
• a talk about communities in marketing
• more testimonials
• let’s get in touch section

The common thread is that they are things I’m most proud of. My website is one part portfolio, one part digital home, one part a platform for my creativity. It’s as complex and multifaceted as I am.

Every now and then I go through and remove sections that I think are not relevant anymore and add new ones.

I wish that if someone early on in their career lands on my site after a workshop, a lecture or a talk, they’ll find inspiring and educational stuff that will lead them forward in their path.

If someone who’s looking to hire great people lands on my site, they’ll get a strong sense of my skills as a technology generalist and be impressed by it and reach out.

If someone who’s looking for a speaker to their event lands on my site, they’ll see what I’ve done before and how I communicate and it will lead to them choosing me to give a talk or host a workshop.