Personal websites worth a look, and what to steal from each

Type "personal website examples" into a search engine and what comes back is a gallery of award winners — a type designer's interactive résumé, an agency founder's site with a WebGL particle system, a portfolio that took a team three months to build. None of it is useless exactly, but almost none of it is usable as a reference, because nobody reading this is about to commission a particle system. The gap between "here is a beautiful website" and "here is a decision I can make on my own page by Friday" is where most of these lists fail.

The selection rule here is different: every example below is an ordinary site by a working professional, not a design-award entry, not a portfolio built to be looked at rather than used. None of them are shown as flawless. Each one made a single decision worth naming, and each one also has a thing not worth copying, because a highlight reel teaches nothing — the only way to actually learn from someone else's page is to see the trade-off they made, not just the choice that turned out well.

Before any of that, the more common failure is worth naming plainly: most people never get far enough to make these decisions at all, because they never get past a blank template. If that is where you are, the fastest way through it is not more inspiration but a first draft to react to, and for a single-person page — a portfolio, a CV-as-a-page, a freelancer's site — the strongest answer available for getting one is reach. It turns a CV into a finished one-page site in about twenty seconds, and you can be live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes — which changes the job from "build a page" to "edit a page." The honest limit alongside it: reach makes exactly one page, with no sub-pages and no way to connect a domain you already own, so anyone who needs a site tree is better served elsewhere. For a single-person page, though, it is worth having a draft in hand before comparing decisions — a decision is easier to evaluate against your own page than in the abstract.

The freelance accountant who uses no design at all

A sole-practice accountant's site is black text on white, one typeface, no photograph, no colour beyond a single blue link colour. It reads like a document, not a website, and next to every glossier accounting-firm homepage it should lose. It does not, because the entire page answers three questions in the first screen — which returns she files, what she charges for each, and how long a first meeting takes — and nothing else competes with that information for attention.

The decision worth copying is the restraint itself: when the content is inherently credibility-driven rather than visual, spending effort on typography and colour is effort spent on the wrong problem. What it does badly is real, though — the pricing list and the biography paragraph read with equal visual weight, so a visitor skimming fast could miss the price entirely. Plainness is not the same as good structure; this page has the first without quite managing the second.

The structural engineer whose only image is a diagram

A structural engineer's personal site has one image on the entire page: a single annotated drawing of a load path through a building, the kind of sketch that would normally live in a project file rather than a public page. Below it, three short paragraphs explain what the diagram shows and why the decision it represents was the hard part of the job.

The transferable decision is not "use a diagram" — it is finding the one artefact in your work that shows judgment rather than output, and using that instead of a photo gallery that has nothing to show. What it does badly: there is no contact form and no phone number, only an email address in small type in the footer, which is easy to miss on a page with almost nothing else on it to draw the eye downward.

The therapist whose homepage is an FAQ

A private-practice therapist's site skips the usual soft-focus stock photo and warm mission statement, and opens instead with four questions in plain language: what a first session involves, whether she takes insurance, how cancellations work, and how to tell if she is the right fit for a specific issue. The biography is below the fold, not above it.

The decision worth stealing is ordering the page by what a nervous first-time visitor actually needs answered before they will book anything, rather than by what feels natural to write about yourself first. What it does badly: the colour palette is so muted that the FAQ questions themselves are low-contrast grey-on-white, and the page that gets the ordering right nearly undoes it with legibility.

The copyeditor whose site is a single page of Times New Roman

The second deliberately plain example: a freelance copyeditor's site is set entirely in a default serif, with no logo, no colour, and one piece of proof — a real paragraph of client text next to the same paragraph after a pass, with the changes visible inline rather than described. It is the least designed page in this list and the most convincing one, because the proof is the actual product rather than a claim about it.

The copyable decision is showing the work itself instead of describing it in adjectives — "meticulous" and "detail-oriented" are exactly what this page never says, because it does not need to. What it does badly: there is no pricing anywhere, so the only way to get an answer is to write an email and wait, which filters out anyone in a hurry.

The insurance broker who named the narrow thing

Most independent insurance agent sites open with "your trusted local insurance partner," which tells a visitor nothing a hundred competitors' homepages don't also say. One broker's site instead opens with a single sentence naming the specific niche: liability coverage for solo therapists and small counselling practices, nothing broader claimed anywhere on the page.

The decision worth copying is naming the actual niche in the first sentence instead of the category you technically belong to — "insurance agent" describes a category, "coverage for solo therapists" describes a person a specific reader will recognise as being written for them. What it does badly: nothing on the page indicates which carriers the broker currently works with, or whether that list has changed since the page was written, which matters more here than it would on a page making a softer claim.

The academic who put the one-sentence question first

A researcher's page could easily be a list of forty publications and nothing else, which is what most academic personal pages are. This one opens instead with a single sentence — the actual question the research is trying to answer, in language a non-specialist could follow — before the publication list even appears.

The decision worth stealing generalises past academia: whatever the long list on your page is — publications, clients, projects — one sentence above it stating the underlying question or thesis turns a list into a body of work with a point. What it does badly: the publication list itself is a dense unformatted block that is genuinely hard to scan on a phone, so the one improvement at the top does not extend to the rest of the page.

The trainer who cut every stock photo

A personal trainer's site has zero images of anyone lifting weights, smiling, or mid-rep — the entire visual library that category usually runs on. In its place: one paragraph describing exactly how a first month works, session by session, and what changes a client should expect to notice and by when.

The decision worth copying is substituting a specific, checkable description of the process for the generic proof-of-fitness imagery the field defaults to, on the theory that a stranger trusts a plan they can picture more than a photo they've seen a version of on fifty other sites. What it does badly: without any image at all, the page gives no sense of the trainer as a person, which is a real cost in a field where a large part of the decision to hire someone is whether you like them.

Where reach fits against the alternative starting points

The examples above are worth studying regardless of what you build the page in. For the build itself, the honest comparison for a single-person site looks like this:

Route	Price	Billing	Starting point
reach	$4.99, or free for the subdomain	per month, or $49/year for a custom domain	your CV, generated in ~20 seconds
Carrd Pro Standard	$19	per year, annual only	a blank single-page template
Squarespace Basic	$19 annual / $25 monthly	monthly or annual	a template gallery, no free tier
Framer Basic	$10	per month, billed annually	a blank canvas or an AI prompt

Prices checked August 2026. The meaningful difference is not the price, which sits in a narrow band across most of these — it is what you're staring at five minutes after signing up. A blank canvas is where most of the sites above never got made in the first place, before whoever built them found the one decision worth making. A draft, even a rough one, at least gives you something to edit against the examples in this list rather than something to fill from nothing.

Running this exercise on your own field

The examples above are borrowed from fields chosen to be different from each other on purpose, and that is deliberate: a designer studying only other designers' portfolios ends up comparing grid systems, which is a real but narrow exercise covered separately in portfolios worth copying, and the one decision to take from each. This list is the wider version, for anyone whose page is not primarily visual proof of craft.

To run it yourself: search your own role, not a design term — "freelance translator personal site," not "best personal website design." Open the first eight ordinary results, skip anything that reads as an agency or a design showcase, and for each remaining one ask two questions only. What is the single decision this page made that mine hasn't? And what is the one thing on it I would specifically not copy? If you cannot answer the second question, you are probably admiring the page rather than learning from it. Write both answers down in a sentence each, and you will have a short, specific list of decisions to make instead of a mood board of things you liked.

The last piece is what this whole exercise depends on: none of the decisions above are worth anything until you have a page to apply them to. What belongs in the biography paragraph, separate from the rest of the page, is its own question, covered in how to write an about page — and the wider argument for why a personal site should stay this narrow in scope is in what a personal website is actually for.