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Yoursellf

What if you could launch a personal web presence in less than a minute? Yoursellf is a minimalist, no-code, no-design take on telling the world that you exist (and are available for hire, if that’s your thing).

Overview

When you spend a decade (and change) building websites for clients, and you have an acute sense of self-awareness/humility, there are times when some...intrusive thoughts can bubble to the surface.

Stuff like:

Are my decorative decisions actually doing anything for this business, or am I just making the client feel good with a pretty design, getting paid, and moving on to the next project? Does this button gradient, on hover, even matter?

Why is it still such a time-consuming design/engineering challenge to boot up a website in the first place? It’s 2026...why isn’t there just an ‘enter email + pay + launch easily-editable web presence’ button out there yet?

Why are we so drunk on decor? Is it Squarespace’s fault? I don’t dress like Derek Zoolander, why does my website need to be Derelicte?

Around the same time these thoughts were eating at me (2024-ish), I noticed a pattern in the site designs of nerds like myself, c/o a website called Dead Simple Sites:

A snapshot of the home page of Dead Simple Sites.

The gears started turning. These were successful designers and developers, with websites that didn’t fit the ‘beautiful, award-winning template’ vibe of every site-builder on the market.

I even noticed that the sites of some tech industry billionaires (like, people that could hire [insert deity of choice] to design their website for them) were absurdly minimalist:

Patrick Collison’s home page (CEO of Stripe).
Patrick Collison’s website (CEO of Stripe).
Dario Amodei’s website (CEO of Anthropic)
Dario Amodei’s website (CEO of Anthropic).
Surya Midha's website.
Surya Midha’s website (Co-founder of Mercor).

Something was up. Sure, these successful chaps don’t need their personal websites to get them work, but they also seemed to just stop at ‘presence’ and let the content do the talking.

Maybe I could encourage my fellow independents to do something similar.

Setting things up

It was clear to me that people needed an option to just get online at their own URL and let the world know they exist.

Having hired contractors who didn’t even have websites (or had god-awful ones), I would be delighted to have a slim, fast-loading, straightforward summary I could read to decide on whether or not I wanted to hire someone.

The No-design approach

No-code was an established industry term, but nobody had really thought to take that constraint to an entire site design (there are some blogging tools out there that come close, but they’re not really portfolio/profile sites). I felt like was just crazy enough to try it out; to leave decoration for the ‘other guys’ and have the simplest, easiest website platform on the internet.

A snapshot of a dummy Yoursellf site.
A snapshot of a dummy Yoursellf site.

No-design is a type of design, so I had to make a few judgment calls along the way:

  • A single-column layout that was accessible and responsive out of the box. The difference between the mobile and desktop views should be almost nothing, and the user shouldn’t have to worry about grids, alignment, margins, gaps, or any of the layout challenges that come with no-code page-builders. Tailwind Typography was a clear choice for the prose styling, and TipTap was a more-than-capable WYSIWYG editor that gave me the tools I needed to build custom extensions (images, embedded videos, hyperlink customization, etc) that users needed to make their ‘columns-o-content’ look professional with zero design skills.
  • No custom styling, for real. This was actually more difficult in practice than in theory. I spent as much time holding myself back from adding features that I did building them, like a product-design Dr. Strangelove. I had to take a hard line on potential customizations like color, typeface, text highlighting, grids, link/button styles, even newsletter embeds (just link out).
  • Burger menu on all screens. This was a tough one, as it’s a somewhat taboo UI design to ‘burger-ify’ navigation on larger screens. But I needed to keep the door open for users to add larger (6-10) numbers of page/post links to their navigation, and I didn’t want to force them to cram their nav into a small horizontal space in the header.
  • No admin back and forth. The gap between the back end of a CMS and its output has always felt too wide to me, so I made sure that the entire content management flow (not just editing posts) was doable in the front. With Yoursellf sites, you add posts, pages, custom posts, navigation items, everything with a simple modal dialog, accessible from anywhere, and you see your additions immediately.
  • Minimal setup. Booting up a Yoursellf site is as simple as entering an email address (and your name) on a checkout page. Paid Memberships Pro’s Network Sites add-on handles the subsite creation (Yoursellf is a multisite network). Custom PHP functions plunk the new user directly on to their new home page when they sign up. Their url is theirname.yoursellf.com (which can be changed later). They launch first, then edit that down, as opposed to the traditional flow where you launch when you’re done building your masterpiece, however long that might take. Some of us need the push :)