The old Web is full of people who used a homepage to explain not what they sold, but why they lived the way they did.
Visit Clay and Judy Woods’ Simple Life pages
Clay and Judy Woods built one of those sites around a decision that began long before the Web existed.
Clay was still in engineering school in 1972 when, as the site tells it, he saw a benefits projection showing what retirement might look like in 2013 and realized he did not want to spend the next forty years waiting for it. A six-month road trip in a 1965 Dodge van followed. The 1973 oil embargo arrived while they were traveling. By the time the trip ended, they had started forming a different idea of work, possessions, and time.
The website eventually became a record of that experiment.
A homepage as life philosophy
The Woods describe years of furniture repair, refinishing, custom woodworking, rescuing an old Victorian house, freelance writing, graphic design, and eventually Web work itself.
By 1997, Word Works had expanded into Web-page design. Judy wrote copy; Clay wrote code. The couple treated websites almost the same way they described handmade furniture: individual creations made for particular people rather than interchangeable products.
That comparison is extremely old-Web.
The site’s “Building the Simple Life” section mixes autobiography with practical philosophy. There are pages of quotations, links, reading suggestions, and explanations of voluntary simplicity. One recurring idea is that efficiency and wealth are not automatically the same thing as a good life.
The result is not a manifesto polished for a publishing platform. It is a personal web of pages accumulated around decades of choices.
That format matters. A modern lifestyle account is usually chronological and ephemeral. A personal site can remain thematic. The reader moves from work to home to travel to philosophy because those subjects are connected in the authors’ lives, not because an algorithm decided what should appear next.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of technical relics, but pages like this preserve something harder to archive: the reasoning behind ordinary people’s life decisions.
Clay and Judy did not merely write about simplicity.
They built a site the simple way too.