I rebuilt my own site three times before I got it right
Fifteen years in, and the lesson keeps repeating: the hard part was never the code. It was deciding what to leave out.
The first version of mazaryk.com went live in 2011, and I was proud of it for about six weeks. It had everything a freelance site was supposed to have that year: a portfolio grid, a services page written in the third person, and a contact form nobody used.
The first one was a portfolio
A portfolio is a strange thing to lead with when what you actually sell is relief. Clients weren’t hiring me because they’d seen a restaurant site they liked — they were hiring me because their nephew had built something two years ago, it had broken, and the nephew had moved to Berlin.
Nobody wants a website. They want to have a website — a different product, sold a different way.
The second one was a system
So I overcorrected. The 2017 rebuild was a proper stack: a headless CMS, a component library, three environments. It was the best-engineered site I have ever shipped and I published four posts on it in three years.
| 2017 build | 2024 build | |
|---|---|---|
| Posts | 4 in three years | 41 in eighteen months |
The third one is a sentence
The site you’re reading started with one line on an index card: I make having a website easy. Everything that didn’t serve that sentence came out. Three rebuilds to learn that editing is the job.