I’m about to start building a site for a personal blog, so I’d love to get inspiration from your favorites -- looking only at the design and not the content. Here are a couple of mine: https://joegebbia.com/dearairbnb and https://kk.org/thetechnium/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/.
https://maggieappleton.com/ for her take on a digital garden. She also compiled more below [0] if opening your thought process to the public is your thing (adopting the concept actually got me to add more structure to my serious notes and actually post more)
My overall advice is unless you're a designer flexing your skills is to focus less on the design and more on the actual writing! The internet is littered with the emaciated husks of nice good looking sites hosting nary an entry beyond "How I Made My New Blog With X"
The illustrations on Maggie's website are gorgeous.
I've been focused on content for 5 years (for my website that pays the bills), but the website is so bland. I'd love if people could go "nice" when they use the website.
It seems like Maggie nailed that. Thanks for sharing.
No. Tablets and Phones do not have window managers. Also, a well defined side margin is not a "bad web trick" but an idea that's as old as print media, perhaps even as old as just written documents.
Really? I feel like it's one of the most interesting but worst designed. It has some random cute design in it (like the ornate characters at the start of articles.. well I remember it having that, but don't see it now on my phone), but is basically unnavigable.
Best is entirely subjective. ;) I'm quite fond of my own(1), but it's pretty basic and heavily modified/hacked together from a very minimal wordpress theme.
Let's start with the two you mentioned: looking at the source code, one's actually built from a squarespace theme, and the other is likewise built from a wordpress theme, feels like an slightly older one given it's not mobile responsive. That's not a knock, by the way - sometimes you want an audience that don't use phones or deliberately flock to the retro vibe.
I don't know your budget or capability to self-code, but browsing squarespace's themes would be what I would recommend if you have a higher budget, and likewise doing the same with wordpress if you're operating on a shoestring mindset. There's some gorgeous ones on both, though squarespace is far more curated and caters to a more modern/slick looking audience and clientele.
I think that website would benefit from having access to a professional UI designer. It's technically impressive, but experience wise, it's amazingly bad.
A new one on me! I know some are offended by the language, but I think a tough talking web designer is funny. They kind of give me that Maddox vibe. He started the trend of tough talkers for comic effect many years ago
https://brianlovin.com/writing/how-my-website-works because of how in-depth he went with hosting his notes, bookmarks, and other projects.
https://wattenberger.com/ for its reactivity/place for her d3.js experiments.
and here is a general collection of dope blog additions: https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/04/cool-things-people-do-w...
My overall advice is unless you're a designer flexing your skills is to focus less on the design and more on the actual writing! The internet is littered with the emaciated husks of nice good looking sites hosting nary an entry beyond "How I Made My New Blog With X"
[0] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners