Site Design

Site design by me. Built on Squarespace 7.1 with ample custom code, and plenty of help from Ghost Plugins.

Typography: Acumin Pro

Script Logo: Custom lettering by Saffron Avenue

A Textually Inclined Manifesto

I know many people—perhaps most people—would consider this website to be plain.

And I suppose it is, but intentionally so. I’ve built dozens of fancy author sites over the past decade, including multiple, show-stopping (← modesty) iterations of my own website.

I’m not as proud of any of them as I am of this one, this little lightweight, elegantly simple corner of the internet.

I don’t want my website to look like a personal billboard. I want it to be a MySpace-era glimpse into all the weird details of my world.

As for the style, I like text. I like websites with lots of negative space that feel like a calm breath of fresh air in an online landscape stuffed with video content, full-screen banner images, and stylized Canva graphics.

But it’s more than just a style preference. Text just works. It’s lightweight and loads fast, even if your site visitor has a shitty connection. It’s universal. It looks good on a 27-inch monitor. It looks good on your phone. It looks good in a narrow column. It looks good in premium typography and it looks good in free fonts.

And based on my own analytics, text websites perform quite well. Organic traffic is up, bounce rate is down, probably because I now spend more time actually creating content than browsing stock photos.

A huge inspiration for this site was Dead Simple Sites, a curated collection of minimal websites self-described as “less, but better.” I also love this profanity-laden gem.

The majority of those sites are made by web developers and designers who built their own websites. Total respect, but I do not know how to build a website from scratch and I’m not really dying to learn.

Luckily, you can fake a minimal site with Squarespace. Once you figure out how to squeak by all their “look at me” colorful templates, you can start with a beautifully blank page. Making building your own corner of the internet as simple as clicking “add text block.”

Bonus: Squarespace unlike Showit, Wordpress and Wix, Squarepace lets you add multiple blogs onto one site. This makes it really easy to create different sections on your website without having to be diligent about category and tag management.

For example, I’m well aware that not everyone who comes here to read my personal updates also cares about astrology, and vice versa. So I’ve created two separate blogs, and people can go down whichever rabbit hole they like.