Your Site Doesn't Need a Personal Statement — It Needs a Personality

Someone asked me recently what chrisjm.co.uk is "for". I said it's where I put things. They looked at me the way you'd look at someone who'd just described their kitchen as "where the bins live".

Fair enough. It's an odd thing, a personal site in 2026. The internet has spent a decade telling us to condense ourselves into a profile, a headline, a five-slide carousel of achievements. Somewhere in all that, the idea got loose that a website is a slightly chattier version of a CV — a defence document, written for a gatekeeper who might, at some point, approve of you.

I don't think that's what this is. Here's why, and five rules I keep circling back to.

Rule one: write to one person, not to "visitors"

The fastest way to make a site sound like nobody wrote it is to write for an audience. "Visitors can explore a range of projects." Who's saying that? Not a person. A paragraph in a brochure.

I write to one specific imaginary person: a mate who's mildly curious and has about four minutes. Sometimes it's a collaborator I've never met. Occasionally it's the version of me from three years ago who'd have found the thing useful.

Practically, that means contractions, second person, and the odd aside that doesn't strictly need to be there. It means if a sentence would sound strange coming out of my mouth in a pub, it doesn't go on the page. It also means the site says "I" rather than "ChrisJM is a creative professional with a passion for..." — because writing about yourself in the third person is the verbal equivalent of wearing a tie to a barbecue.

Rule two: project pages need a why, not a spec sheet

Every portfolio I've ever rolled my eyes at has the same structure: title, three screenshots, a list of technologies, done. None of it tells you what the thing felt like to make, or what went wrong, or whether it was worth it.

The project notes on this site are deliberately unpolished in that sense. I'd rather tell you that a build took three weekends instead of one, that the first version was scrapped, that a decision looked sensible in October and daft by February. That's the bit people actually learn from. The stack list is the least interesting true thing about any project.

So: how long did it take, what did it cost in evenings, what would you change, who was it for, what surprised you. Write the boring honest answer to at least two of those and your project page will outclass most "case studies" on the internet.

Rule three: pick a rhythm you could keep on a bad week

Every personal site I've ever seen with a "new post every Friday" banner has, without exception, stopped posting by the following spring. The banner stays up. It becomes a small monument to ambition.

I'd rather publish four things a year that I'd happily defend than forty that I wrote because a calendar told me to. Cadence should be a byproduct of having something to say, not a promise you make to strangers who aren't waiting.

Where a schedule does help is in lowering the bar. "One note a month, however short" is a good rule because it makes the tiny posts legitimate. A 200-word note about a small fix is not a failure to write an essay — it's the format doing its job. If you do want to promise something publicly, promise the small version. Nobody is refreshing your homepage on a Friday night. I'm fairly sure of this.

Rule four: show the scaffolding — but know where the towel goes

Showing unfinished work is one of the genuinely good things the internet taught us. It's also where a personal site can go badly wrong.

The line I try to hold: show the work, not the wound. A half-built thing with a note explaining what's still wobbly is generous — it lets someone else learn from your position. A live feed of your invoices, your inbox, your therapy session and your argument with a client is not vulnerability, it's a window nobody asked to look through.

Practical version: publish the process, not the private people. Ask before you name a collaborator, a client, a family member. Keep the numbers vague unless the numbers are the point. And if you're writing about a thing that went badly, decide whether you're telling the story for the reader or working something out for yourself. If it's the second one, write it in a notebook first. Sometimes it stays there, and that's the correct outcome.

Rule five: let some of it be an opinion

A site with no opinions is a portfolio with the lights off. You click around, you see some nice work, you feel nothing, you leave.

This is why the Opinion section exists here rather than on some other platform. It's not a hot-take machine — the internet has quite enough of those, thank you — it's the place where I say what I actually think about a thing I've spent time with. How a tool behaves after six months. Why a certain kind of site design annoys me. What I've changed my mind about.

Opinions date. That's fine. A post from years ago saying something I no longer believe isn't an embarrassment, it's a record of a person thinking. The only rule is that when I'm wrong, I say so in public rather than quietly deleting the evidence. I've retired a few pieces from the archive for exactly that reason — and written about the retirement, rather than pretending they never existed.

The bit where I admit this is all a bit self-serving

I'm describing my own site, so obviously I think these are the right rules. But the underlying point isn't about my site at all.

A CV is written for a gatekeeper. It's structured to survive a scan, to answer the questions someone else decided matter, to leave nothing ambiguous. A personal site written the same way is technically finished and completely pointless.

The site should be written for the person who clicked because they were curious. That person wants a sense of you — your pace, your preoccupations, the way you explain a thing when nobody's grading it. Personality before polish. A conversation, not an application.

Which is why, if someone asks me again what chrisjm.co.uk is for, I'll give the same answer. It's where I put things. I just hope that when you read them, it sounds like a person.