Even 10 years ago the need for a personal website was questionable, since already back then you could have gotten by just by having one or more social media profiles, but I always felt that you should also have your own personal website, where you are not bound by the limitations of a platform. In a personal website you can choose exactly how you want to showcase your work and yourself. You can choose to emphasize specific works, elements, and it’s a way to define your artistic self in a clearer way that what a social media account allows you to.

Up until recently, my personal portfolio website was built and hosted on Wix. I never really liked Wix, the platform is clunky and hasn’t been significantly improved since I started using it back in 2015. Plus, it’s expensive; the basic subscription is over $100 a year.

But what made me now, in 2026, build my own website from scratch, using actual HTML and CSS? The decision to build a website wasn’t really a spontaneous clear cut decision coming out of the blue, but rather a slowly materialized thought that was part of a larger process of examining my relationship with digital technology.

Social Media

I’ve been using social media both as a casual user and as an artist trying to showcase my art, but over the last few years it had become more clear just how much, both as an artist and as a casual user, social media was not doing for me any good.

As an artist, I never really quite got the hang of it. I’ve been uploading my art for years but without much success, and in recent years my outreach just seemed to become smaller and smaller. As the platforms started imitating Tiktok and favoring short form vertical video content, a very narrow type of art content became dominant. Artists have been pushed harder and harder to upload vertical short form videos of themselves talking about the process, as the platform drastically limited the reach of static images of the art itself, forcing everyone using it into annoyingly similar behaviors and patterns.

As a casual user - it also became more and more clear just how toxic social media has become. All the platforms just became horrible. They’re filled with bots and AI slop, you barely see content from people you actually follow, all you see is suggested content, aggregated into your feed by aggressive attention hunting algorithms. These algorithms radicalizes people, pushing their views into narrow extremes, I noticed how social media made me more anxious and how it just drank away hours of my life.

Both as a user and as an artist trying to showcase my art - Social media just became a shitty place to spend my time. As a casual viewer I stopped using it almost entirely. I deleted the apps from my phone and put blocking adding to my browser so to avoid “accidentally” finding myself in one of them. As an artist - I’ve been uploading to them less and less, questioning whether I can reach an audience in other means.

Indie Web and Static Websites

As I was getting fed up with social media, I started learning more about the alternatives. Turns out that underneath the “mainstream” internet of popular social media - there are still a lot of people publishing their own sites. That’s how I I discovered the static website framework (And specifically HUGO), and was immediately curious.

HUGO is essentially a free and open-source framework that lets you build your own website based on a layout, made out of chunks of HTML. HUGO also lets you write the Content of your website (Like the paragraphs of this post) inside a Markdown File, which for simplicity’s sake I can say it is pretty much like writing in a regular word document. Once you define your layout and add the content, it builds the website for you automatically by populating the layout you’ve built with the content you wrote in the Markdown files. To put it shortly: You build the layout and provide the content, and HUGO puts it all together.

You don’t have to build the layout yourself, there are hundreds of free themes available on the HUGO website, but since I like to make things extra hard and complicated, I built a custom layout and design from scratch. It required a lot more “getting my hands dirty” with learning HTML, CSS, and the templating mechanics of HUGO, but it also made my website a lot more customized and personal.

So Why?

So why did I do all this? Why not stay on Wix or switch to Claude or some other terrible AI option? You could argue that it’s all just a big fat procrastination, something to mess around with instead of doing the actual work (Like finishing my short animated film, Shuttered). But to be perfectly honest, I just really really really wanted to do it. Once I started tinkering with HTML and with HUGO I just couldn’t stop, and became completely obsessed. What can I say, deep down I am just a big nerd!