In short, he turned his landing page into a summary, turning a blog (or, at least the front page of the blog) into more of a profile page.

The home page remains clean, despite all the extra info. But to me, I don't see a huge difference...Maybe I'm just against textured backgrounds (ughh, it's horrible!).

Indeed, the textured background is pretty useless. It adds nothing significant to the visual presence of the site. All it does, at least on my monitors, is make me go, "Wait...that's not a solid color."

Personally, I would've played around with some colors and patterns more: making the headers darker and adding something in the background that would complement well.

Thanks for the feedback; I'm not that happy with it either. I just didn't want plain white. I'll play around with some stuff this weekend.

In addition to my comment (as I didn't expect you to reply), I apologize if it came off a little /too/ straightforward. I just re-read my comment and felt that it might be a huge kick in the nuts to some people, though it's usually how I give feedback to myself and the designers I work with.

But anyway, good luck finding something you (and probably your users too :)) are happy with.

His homepage reminds me of this quite a bit: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/

Agreed, although his site is much prettier, and the post view pages look like dave.is or zach holman's site. It's a coincidence we are both using Interstate Condensed.

Or you can take the hardcore approach, make your own CMS, your own SQLite database, search system, comments system, sharing functions, etc.. from scratch. On the plus side, I never have to install WP security updates! ;)

But you do have to keep on top of whatever security holes there may be in your own code, and fix whatever bugs pop up. Hopefully before a XSS vulnerability is exploited.

For a low traffic site that is updated a couple of times a month, how about static pages with some scripting on the client machine? I use

    text files -> bash script calls markdown and adds header/footer -> another bash script generates indexes -> lftp syncs

Jekyll/Octopress+Git http://octopress.org/

Thanks, I had seen Jekyll but this looks like Jekyll plus sensible defaults for a website with all the bells and whistles. My personal site has no bells, and I can't whistle too well. :-)

This site is solid and quickly gives a good idea of the who the owner is and what he does. Love it. It would be great to combine this design concept and personal information with the indie web experiments (syndicating and aggregating your actions, microformatting the heck out of everything, etc) http://tantek.com/ advocates for on his personal page. Together, it's a good model for the future of the personal web presence.

Funny you mention that site, it was one of the ones I used as an inspiration...

Photo of yourself on the front page is just tacky.

OK, I'll play devil's advocate: I think the photo is wonderful.

It got me interested in who he is, got me to click around his website, got me to read some of his articles published in his college newspaper, got me reading his old email newsletters, etc.

Without a photo, I doubt I would have made that first click around.

Agreed, you should probably keep the picture of yourself just for the about section.

Great redesign overall though. I was thinking of doing something along these lines for my own site and that comforts me in the idea.

Can you give me some more feedback? Is it just having a photo on the page that's the problem or is it the photo itself?

I A/B tested a few photos on hotornot.com but I'm not sure that the photos that tested best there would do the best on my own site.

Personally I think the photo is great, it's nicely personal.

It's more that I don't think it shouldn't be on the home page, it always distracts me where I'd like to focus on the content instead. It would be perfect in the about section I'd say.

When I see a profile pic, especially in the top left, I immediately question whether the author is interested in producing good content or just self-promotion. And yes. The picture you chose is not the most flattering.

This is a harsh comment but there is some truth in it (the photo itself is nice!). I have to admit that I almost disregarded you as someone who is self-promoting. I'm glad I didn't, because this article is good, but bear in mind that other people might do. If it was me I might put a picture on the about page.

I don't know if hotornot.com is the best place to A/B test these things. How many people on that site think you photo is 'hot or not' says nothing about how tacky (or not) it will look in this particular context.

pyre: the A/B testing was more for a profile photo for online dating than for my personal site :) Neither of the photos that I'm using right now on my website was the one that tested the best.

I like it. I've been dissatisfied with my personal website ( http://yllus.com/ ) for a number of reasons, and you providing a child theme that would let me quickly switch over it just the push I needed. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback. The problem with having all the posts there is that it's difficult to order them in a way that makes sense. I argued against reverse chronological order in the post.

Maybe you could show a list of post titles and short excerpts, and clicking on any post expands the content in place.

If you work at Google, and on the Search Quality Team, no less, then shouldn't your personal page be simply a search box, with maybe a tag cloud underneath, and potentially hosted by Google App Engine or Google Sites? I'm not being sarcastic. That's what I would do, if I worked there, and had lots of content which I didn't want to continuously re-prioritize (based on who my visitors were, or what I expected they would want to see at any given moment).