A modern personal site is often a portfolio, newsletter signup, or carefully narrowed personal brand. The Werme Family Home Page is from the older school: put the things you care about online and let the homepage grow around them.
An older version of the homepage cheerfully apologizes for the lack of “a flash animation with cacophonous music” and then immediately starts branching in every direction.
There are family trips. Bicycle rides. Quilting. Colonial reenactment. Weather. Climate. GPS. Geocaching. Sundials. New Hampshire politics. Data visualization. Court issues. Snow depth. Car crashes. Old photographs. Software engineering. A Pamela Smart page. A state-budget browser. A 1978 blizzard account.
This is not bad information architecture so much as a faithful map of a person’s brain.
Ric Werme describes himself as a software engineer and “hacker – in the best sense of the word.” He also says his computing roots reach back to ARPANET work at Carnegie Mellon, where he implemented FTP and Telnet for PDP-10 systems. Elsewhere the site contains weather data and programming experiments, including plots inspired by Edward Tufte’s ideas about information display.
Paula Werme’s sections add legal work, quilting, family history, hiking, and other projects. The site also preserves long-form accounts of trips, including a 2003 cross-country bicycle journey and references to Ric’s 1974 ride from Palo Alto toward Montana.
The homepage is the archive
The important thing here is not any single subject. It is the refusal to split a life into separate branded channels.
A weather observation can sit next to family photographs. A software anecdote can sit next to a bicycle trip. A page about a snowstorm can remain useful twenty years later because nobody decided it was “off topic” and deleted it during a content refresh.
That gives the site enormous archaeological value. Personal websites like this preserve the incidental material that institutional archives rarely collect: what somebody was learning, fixing, arguing about, measuring, photographing, and thinking about at a particular time.
The site even includes a Lynx inspected badge and the declaration that no Microsoft programs are necessary to appreciate it. That is almost a manifesto for durable Web publishing.
For modern webmasters, the lesson is not that every homepage should become this sprawling. It is that longevity often comes from owning the material and keeping old pages addressable. A site can be messy and still be extraordinarily useful.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of this kind of personal web: strange mixtures that would never survive a social platform’s demand for one topic, one audience, and one kind of post.