Personal websites are the best way to have a home on the internet.
While every site is—and should be—a personal expression of its owner, it can also be useful to adopt some standard pages that visitors often benefit from. Each of these pages is best found at the root directory, which is why I list them as /pagename—a simple default that others don’t need to search for.
Here are my suggestions:
/About
Just about every site seems to have an /about page. This tends to be a static, rarely-updated page where you say a bit about yourself, usually using broad biographical strokes with a few hints into your personality. You toss up a head shot and call it a day. You’ve already seen countless of these, so you know exactly what these look like.
/Now
Even though nearly every site has an /about page, it’s rarely useful for learning more about what’s happening in your life right now.
That’s where a /now page comes in. I was first introduced to this concept by Derek Sivers, and it’s an idea that’s quickly caught on. The idea is to share what you’re generally up to these days—what you might tell a friend you haven’t seen in awhile. It’s not too granular like social media, but not to high-level like an /about page—maybe some updates on your life, new projects adopted, goals achieved, big upcoming trips. This is a page to update regularly.
Some folks (👋) have even started archiving these /now updates at a /then page.
/Follow
As many of us have several different sites, projects, social media accounts, newsletters, podcasts, and so forth, it can be useful to have a single page where someone can follow your work.
I suggest that you bring all of this information together into a single page: URLs, RSS feeds, newsletter subscription forms. One single page with all the ways that someone can follow all your stuff. This might be the most useful page on your entire website!
/Contact
This is a simple page that explains how to contact you. This might include a contact form, and/or email address and/or phone number or how to get a hold of you on some other messaging app. Simple but useful stuff.
/Interests
An /interests page helps others get to know you a bit better. It’s a way to show what you’re really into, especially what hobbies you enjoy, what fandoms you might participate in, and any other big favorite things that you have (make sure to link to any relevant posts, categories, or tags on your site). This acts as a solicitation of sorts to connect when a visitor discovers you both like the same weird shit.
/Uses
Online reviews suck these days—just completely useless garbage. A /uses page is a way to describe what products and services you own, use, and rely on. This gives others a chance to ask you about products they may be considering, and give them ideas about things they might like using too.
/Blogroll
Once upon a time, the primary way you discovered cool new websites was a list of links—called a blogroll—on the sidebar of someone’s site, indicating the site the author followed most closely. For some reason, they fell out of fashion in blog designs. It’s time to bring them back.
/Support
Many sites these days offer a way to support micro-payments or subscriptions to support the site author. If this is you, then adding a simple explanatory page at /support is an easy way to lay out the various ways that folks can support your efforts, whether that’s a direct micropayment or using an affiliate (foreshadowing 🙊) link.
/Ideas
Some people (👋) have lots of ideas for random projects they’d like to work on. An /ideas page is a stake in the ground, planting the seed in the hopes that someone will help you turn the idea into reality.
👉 (my /ideas page is actually located at Free Ideas)
/Save
If you use affiliate programs, this is a great spot to put them all on one page. Start off with your disclosure and toss all the links and coupon codes into one place. Add a table of contents at the top and use anchor tags to make it easier for your friends to support you when they sign up for a new service or buy a specific product.
/Colophon
A /colophon page describes the nuts and bolts of your website: what tool(s) you used to build it, how you host it, and any other details that visitors might be interested in (fonts, themes, icon sets, etc). You might include some of this info on your /uses page.
/Privacy
If you’re collecting personal information from visitors, then you should have a page describing what you’re doing with that data. Put it at /privacy, preferably in simple language that anyone can understand. (btw, big kudos to you if you don’t collect any info!)
Back in the early days of blogging, launching your own website required quite a bit of knowledge and a quite long list of steps to…