The best personal websites do not answer the question “What is your niche?” They answer “What are you into?”
Visit Jan Sikusi’s Wonderdream
Jan Sikusi’s homepage is a compact directory of interests that would make a social-media strategist nervous.
There is Lightspeed Lattice, Bolognese sword fighting, a Toki Pona font collection, a Museum of Peculiar Artifacts, pages about writing English and Hebrew in cuneiform, a chess adventure through time, a game called Safari Steve, a page about the owner’s Shih Tzu, and a guestbook.
Sikusi says the main interests at the moment are swordfighting, Latin, Toki Pona and chess. By trade, the author is a software engineer, but the page makes a point of saying that software engineering is not supposed to become the entire identity.
That sentence explains the website better than a design manifesto could.
Interests do not need a content strategy
Platform profiles encourage specialization because specialization is easy to categorize. The woodworking account does woodworking. The chess account does chess. The programmer account talks about programming until everyone involved would rather chew drywall.
A personal homepage has no such obligation.
The Jan Sikusi site can place sword fighting next to constructed languages and cuneiform because the organizing principle is simply one person. That was normal on the early web. A homepage was not a publication vertical. It was a map of somebody’s brain.
The structure helps. Instead of one endless chronological feed, the homepage divides material into sections such as games, passions, funny bits and personal pages. Visitors choose a door rather than waiting for an algorithm to decide which fragment deserves visibility today.
That is one reason CacheRat keeps modern handmade sites beside older material in the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list. The old web was not important because every page was built in 1997. It was important because people controlled the shape of their own publishing space.
Neocities gave that idea a new place to live, and sites like this actually use it.
There is no obvious conversion funnel here. No carefully constrained brand voice. No attempt to explain why cuneiform and a Shih Tzu belong together.
They belong together because Jan put them there.
That used to be enough reason to make a webpage.