Everyone Should Be Like Me Because I'm The Bestest And Smartest Person Ever
Consider this a less comedic version of my Moxistan News article 6 Types Of Personal Websites.
As someone with a personal website, I've browsed hundreds of other personal websites throughout the years of having mine and one thing I've noticed about pretty much all of them is that they all just suck. Of all the personal websites I've come across, I can only think of four minus my own that I actually like.
Substance
The most important part of your website is the actual stuff on it. It could be writing, art, photography, whatever but unless it's some purposefully lacking art project, it should have actual stuff on it, a reason for me to actually visit it. So taking this into mind, like 90% of Neocities sites automatically suck. Chances are, the majority of sites you're gonna visit are gonna be Neocities sites and while I do believe Neocities itself is a great platform that makes static website creation and hosting extremely easy, this lowered bar of entry does mean that most the stuff on there is vapid, unfinished crap no one would ever care about.
What you will notice is that so many websites on Neocities, while looking cool and genuinely impressive-looking in terms of styling, just have absolutely no actual substance to them. Often, the best part of the website is their 'About Me' which half the time is just their listing all the crap they like and don't like. And as an autist, I can say this is this just a bunch of spergatry. They're pretty much just the Users of the personal website world.
Even worse is when people publish a website that's under construction while lacking any substance whatsoever. Most people are probably only ever gonna visit your website once and by making a big sign that says "There is no actual website here", you're just guaranteeing they'll never return to it again. If you're gonna publish a website, make it fully functioning before publishing. I spent almost two months making this website before publishing it because I knew I needed actual crap on it if I wanted people to get anything out of it. I know I probably hold more value in my website than others hold in theirs but have at least something on your website before publishing it and killing any chance of repeat visits and bookmarks.
Design
Pretty much every personal website ever has a godawful design. There are mainly two types of paradigms you'll come across. The best I can describe them is either as Old Web Style or Blog Style.
Old Web Style is what you'll mainly find on Neocities, genuinely old websites, and pretty much any kid's site that's nostalgic for a time they never actually experienced. This design mainly consists of some navigation area where they put all their stuff like Home, About Me, Shrines, Links, and maybe, just maybe, categories for actual stuff they've made or written. This paradigm isn't really bad itself but it often splits everything into subcategories which often split more into subsubcategories and this can make navigation painful, especially if the styling gets in the way. There's no way to skim for crap you'd be interested in without going to a site map if there even is one which itself, probably lacks styling or organization to make navigation any easier.
While I do believe Old Web Style can be made to work fine and it's usually styling that gets in the way of navigation, Blog Style just pisses me off no matter how well styled or even designed it is. You see this paradigm most often on pretty much anything somewhat modern outside of Neocities. Whether the site is made with some software like Wordpress, Blogger, or a static site generator, trying to navigate any of these sites just sucks. Even if the styling is perfect, the design language is perfect, you can't frickin' find anything without either scrolling or clicking through pages of articles likely only categorized by date. Even if they're tagged, you still have to go to an entirely new damn page or list of pages for that tag then likely scroll or click through pages again to find what you're looking for or something that may interest you. If there aren't many writings, then Blog-Styled websites aren't as painful but if you're on some person's site that's been writing for the last twenty years who's entire catalog is just a giant list of hundreds of articles that may or may not be tagged or labeled, it's just wasting time for someone trying to find what they're looking for or something that may interest them.
Style
For Old Web Style, as cool and unique as the site may be, half the time trying to read the crap is hard and the styling makes navigation harder. They often make the text super tiny and put everything in a box which you must scroll through instead of the webpage itself, increasing the effort of reading and navigating. I shouldn't have squint to read your stuff or scroll through three different boxes just to read everything because you want your cutesy little box. This styling could work for a homepage or basic navigation but don't put your 2,000-word essay in a box which takes up only like 25% of the screen space while still fitting the navigation bar and whatever other elements to be shared with the actual page.
Please make responsive websites. I shouldn't have to be on the exact resolution of the computer you used to make the website to view it properly nor should it be borderline nonfunctional because you purposefully wanted to screw over mobile visitors. And it's not even that hard to make a site responsive. This website works perfectly fine on mobile and you know what I did to make that so? Absolutely nothing. You don't even need to actively make a website mobile friendly and in fact, you shouldn't because from what I've experienced, websites with no regard for mobile users have better mobile experiences than anything actively designed for mobile. But somehow, people still find a way to ruin their site on mobile. In fact, I even checked how well this website and Moxistan.com looked on a PlayStation Vita and you know what? Everything looks just fine. You have to go out of your way to make a website not work on mobile. There is no excuse.
For Mox's sake, please check the accessibility of your website. There are countless contrast checkers to make sure your text is actually readable and use design language that can be understood by anyone with at least a day of experience on the internet. Don't use weird or abstract navigation or design because you think it's cool or cute.
As for Blog-Styled sites, you can always just tell when when it's a Wordpress site or uses a pre-themed static site generator. It's the opposite problem of Old Web-Styled websites. Instead of genuinely creative stylings of various functionality, it's just bland premade stylings for whatever software is being used.
Hosting
You don't need dynamic server-whatever crap for your website. This means stop using frickin' Wordpress or whatever other bloated dynamic website software when your website would be better as a static one. Your 10KiB HTML file doesn't need to become a 20MiB server request. If hand coding a website is really that hard for you, then use a static site generator or something. If you can't just hand-code it, it's probably overly complicated. I only have like 10 HTML tags memorized and I can make 99% of everything on this website without looking stuff up. It's not that hard.
Also, despite what certain people may tell you, you don't need a VPS or to host from home. If all you need is simple static site hosting, there are countless free web hosts. Hosting from your home will just soft-dox you and should only be done for darknet sites and a VPS is still someone else's computer. If you're concerned about censorship, the very nature of a website being static makes it extremely easy to mirror and copy and you can just put mirrors wherever and archiving services should work perfectly.
JavaScript
There should be none. If you have a tool or game or something, then sure, you'll need it on that page but you shouldn't need JavaScript at all to read your stuff or look at things. On the opposite end, don't block my access to your site by telling me I need to disable my browser's JavaScript when your site is not at all illicit. If I'm trying to buy dark web mystery boxes at 3 AM then sure, warn me to disable JavaScript but if your website is just your schizobabbling and you block my access and tell me I need to disable my browser's JavaScript, you can fuck off.
I should not see a number higher than zero on my Brave Shields, uBlock Origin, or blocked connections on my VPN. I shouldn't be datamined while I'm on your website. And if you're using something that doesn't let you disable that crap, stop using shitty dynamic website hosting crap.
Blocks
One time while looking for help on something, I tried clicking the search result only to be met with a message saying my access had been blocked because I was using Brave and then the message continued on with the various controversies of the Brave Browser. Y'know, because blocking access entirely to a browser with less than 1% market share is such a brave and inspiring work of activism. Because Brave did some bad things, this idiot decided the users should be the ones to suffer because the company did something bad. And something tells me they don't block access to Chrome despite the fact it's spyware and refuses to implement basic privacy defaults every other browser has, or Edge with how Microsoft will violate user consent by forcing Edge to be the default browser, or Safari with how Apple enforces a Webkit monopoly on iPhones, eliminating competition from competing browser engines. No, let's do pretend activism by blocking access to one of the least shit browsers because they did like two bad things five years ago that's still nothing compared to what the browsers with actual market share do. What a frickin' clown. To the guy who runs that website I don't even remember the name of: Genuinely, fuck you.
Originality
Even if a website doesn't suck based on what I've already discussed, it's often either the 18-trillionth tech blog or the stuff on it will just be memetic regurgitations of crap they're copying from other people. On one end, it's gender-confused teens spamming memetic symbols with no actual discussion. On the other, it's people yapping about how based they are because they regurgitate the memetics of religion. So many personal websites are just retards regurgitating crap.
If you're gonna have a website, put stuff on it that's actually original or at least adapts non-original stuff. I don't care about your regurgitated opinions on the culture war psyop. I can tell when you're just copying breadtube rhetoric and I can pinpoint the exact Luke Smith video you're copying. If you find it that insightful, link to it in a Links page or something, don't just regurgitate already existent crap.
I'm Better Than You
This is where I go on about how my website is the bestest one ever.
The Tree Of Mox is so far, the best website navigation I have yet to come across. Instead of hiding everything behind directories and directories of directories or making an endless list no one want to navigate through, I designed a way to just put everything on the website into what is essentially a well-organized site map. No clicking through a bunch of crap to find what you're looking for or something that may interest you. Everything is clearly categorized and easy to skim. And besides, find one other website that puts My Little Pony stuff directly after sincere commentaries on society. My website truly exudes the essence of Gang Weed.
The colors of the website are both personal and purposeful. Pure white text on pure black background creates great contrast for general text. Headings are colors which are personal to me and since black is one of these colors, the heading colors match perfectly with the background. Internal links are green to symbolise the green of plants, referencing the Tree Of Mox. External links to my own stuff are colored after cherry blossoms, still referencing the plant metaphor of my Tree Of Mox but somewhat foreign. And links to stuff that isn't mine is distinguished by just being underlined. The actual contents of the website are unlittered, to the point, and different elements are clearly distinguished when necessary.
All in all, I have the best website ever and I'm better than you.
Written 2026-1-8 Published 2026-2-1