Why my website is just a list now

I rebuilt this website four times in one week.

Version one was warm and green. It looked like a business coach who owns a lot of scented candles. Deleted.

Version two was a proper funnel page. Hero, services, case studies, testimonials, FAQ. Correct and boring. Deleted.

Version three was a bento grid. Very 2025. It looked like everyone else's bento grid. Deleted.

Version four is what you are looking at: my face in a sidebar and a list of facts. It took twenty minutes to build and it was instantly right.

Here is the thing I had to rebuild four times to understand: layouts do not sell anything. Facts do. 4.34 million search impressions for one client is interesting whether it is in a bento tile or a plain list. In the plain list you find it faster.

Some numbers about this site, because I like numbers:

• 9 pages, 2 languages, 1 layout file
• 14 KB of HTML, 19 KB of CSS, roughly zero JavaScript
• My portrait went from 320 KB to 9 KB. Nobody noticed, which is the point
• Lighthouse: 100 / 100 / 100 / 100 on mobile
• The product cards show real visitor charts, baked into the HTML at build time as SVG. No tracking scripts, no chart library

The stack is Astro and Tailwind on my own server. A blog post is one file. An experiment is one folder. Nothing to maintain, nothing that breaks at 3am.

There is also an llms.txt now, so when someone asks an AI assistant about me, the assistant gets a clean briefing instead of guessing. Chrome's Lighthouse just started auditing for this. That corner of the internet is being rebuilt right now, quietly, and being early there costs about half an hour.

If your website has not been touched since 2023: you probably do not need a redesign either. You need a shorter page with better facts. Steal the idea.

Questions? [email protected] or @halfmage.