Modern publishing advice says a website needs a niche. Neal Pritchett’s NotPurfect takes the older approach: a homepage can simply contain whatever its owner has spent enough time thinking about to write down.
The front page introduces itself as a set of cobbled-together pages and immediately complains, in effect, that there is too much to know and too little time, bandwidth and server space. That is about as accurate a mission statement for the personal web as anyone ever wrote.
The surviving homepage was still being updated in August 2026. Its major links include The Nuclear Tourist, a writing section and Jazzman — The Life of a Jazz Musician in Milwaukee, including music clips. There is no attempt to make these subjects fit beneath a carefully optimized brand umbrella. They fit because they belong to the same person.
That matters more than it sounds.
Personal websites used to preserve the connections between a person’s interests. A reader might arrive for one subject and accidentally discover another. The site owner did not need to launch separate channels for travel, history, music, essays and technical opinions. The homepage itself was the organizing principle.
Pritchett also explicitly asks readers to report inaccuracies. That little note captures another useful old-web habit: publishing was often provisional. A knowledgeable reader could email the author, argue a point and perhaps improve the page. The site was a document, but it was also a conversation endpoint.
The visual language is equally unprocessed. Quotes, clocks, images and links sit together because the author wanted them there. It feels closer to looking at someone’s desk than browsing a content product.
There is a practical preservation lesson here. A social-media account can tell you what a person posted during the lifespan of one platform. A long-lived personal domain can show how their interests accumulate over decades. The result may be uneven, eccentric and occasionally difficult to categorize. That is exactly why it is valuable.
Browse NotPurfect while the original structure is still intact. It is not a perfect website. The name warned you. It is something increasingly rarer: a website that still feels owned by one particular human being.