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HUMANS — Discover the web homes of the people who build the internet
A curated gallery featuring the world's best personal websites. The list consists of projects built with various technologies and services: React, Angular, Vue, WP and even Wix or About.me sites. Find inspiration to build your perfect personal homepage.
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It was quite a lengthy process. My main sources of inspiration were awards sites, mainly awwwards, cssdesignawards and FWA, but I also searched quite a lot on Dribbble and Behnace, which are design-oriented websites, design magazines, Twitter accounts of webdesigners and others. I also checked to see if makers on this site have personal websites, and I featured some of them.
My criteria wasn't especially to include only the best looking personal websites, but to have a variety of styles, services and technologies to see what's actually there and what are people currently doing to design their personal homes on the web.
Hello humans,
So, I wanted to build myself a personal website.
It's shocking, but some people still do that and I wanted to discover what are the best designs for personal sites today? What technologies and services are people using? Are people coding them from scratch? Is Squarespace and Wordpress so popular as it seems? Is purple the new black in website design?
I needed inspiration and fast, so I started reviewing personal homepages. I wanted to see what other makers are building; What are designers building? Or maybe people in other industries - authors? photographers? hairdressers? Where can I find some good examples that lead me to my design.
Fast forward a few weeks, I talked to a few dozens of inspirational makers, designers and developers. They told me their stories and shared a bit about how they built their homes on the web. I also reviewed over a thousand personal websites from all over the globe - from Japan to Brazil, America to Qatar. The result is humans.fyi. This is a design gallery of the internet homes of the people who are building the internet.
Many of the websites featured on the list were made by the awesome members of this maker community, so check if your own website is there and submit it if it's not. I'd love to have them all for future reference and for inspiration.
Feel free to browse and enjoy. You can filter, sort, upvote stuff, share on social media. You know how these things work. Have a good time.
Follow the project manifesto and roadmap on this notion page: https://www.notion.so/What-s-beh...
Oh, I still didn't build my page, being so busy with making this list, but I'm on my way and will update once it's done.
@kobyof Last time I had a personal website with my name in the domain was like 7 years ago. Since, I stopped paying godaddy, some scammer got the domain and is dropshipping from it (good luck with that), and I'm using twitter as my go-to place to send people that want information about me and my business.
Why do you think I should bother with a personal domain and design and stuff?
@davidleib4 I was actually asking myself the same thing :)
I guess when you have your own space online you can control the design and content and it's forever yours (as long as you pay godaddy... right?)
With other platforms, they can use your data, you are restricted to their structure and their design. For example, with Twitter you have just so much space to put your bio and links. Whoever gets to your profile page may need to scroll quite a bit to get to the interesting parts (even if you pin something).
Moreover, when you have your own space I guess you can showcase your design abilities, which is really important for those of us who code or design stuff online.
As platforms get better, and you can customize them quite a bit, it gets tougher to decide. It's still an open question for me, but I think I'm going to rebuild my personal webpage quite soon. I got a lot of inspiration building this project, and I have a few ideas of interesting stuff I want to make.
@kobyof I built myself website on about.me platforma 5 years ago. Thinking about changing now. Will look for advice.
Love this so much, but please please just say no to beard sorting in the top nav. :)
What a great idea for a project, I love exploring people's personal sites, they have so much more personality than social media profiles. And thank you for including mine, it was a nice surprise coming across it while exploring the site! 😄
@jamesdaly90 I agree that personal sites hold the potential for much more versatility and creativeness than any social profile. While exploring different sites, I encountered some really jaw dropping examples of personal creativity. Thank you for making them!
@shun_yamada Thank you! You'll get notified once your submission is up on the site.
@weiweihsu_ omg, of course we are not. And part of the reason I did filtering for gender in HUMANS was to emphasize the work of non-male makers. It's work in progress so we are adding more and more every day. Hopefully you'll see the gender ration improve soon.
Awesome idea and execution..wanted to ask few things
1)I see many profiles and as you explained how do you get the profiles ...do you add a crawler to get the profiles or manually find and add them
2)There is on demand loading of profiles on reaching bottom is it intended?
3)What tech stack you used to build this.
nice collection bookmarking it!!
@rajatrao777
Hey, sorry for the late response. I have been swamped with responses in the last few days.
1 - After finding the profiles manually (or some profiles are submitted), there is a manual review for each website + automatic crawling of the profile site to get meta information like technology used, social network stuff and more.
2 - Of course, it's endless scrolling by design
3 - The production version is currently on vanilla js with mongodb on the background. There is work in progress to shift to react.
Thanks for the feedback! Many new features launching soon, so check back to see if you like it.
I am teaching a class on Personal Branding at the Jack Welch College of Business and Technology at Sacred Heart Univ. Would love to have you present when we cover websites.
Good idea. I was thinking about a makeover for my site. I'll check some designs to get inspiration.
@rogermenhaim Thank you for commenting. Submit your website to be featured once you complete the makeover!
This is an interesting one. @jacob I'm curious how you decided which filters to offer (colors, gender... beards?), and whether you plan to add more filters, categories or a rating system.
@corinna_keefe Thanks for the feedback. For filters, colors seemed like a natural fit, as it makes sense to cluster sites based on common design properties. You can actually filter by any tag on the system, so if you see a featured website that you like and click on any tag (say, a technology property like react or vue, or a personal property like 'developer' or 'designer' or 'hairdresser' or whatnot, you can filter by that. The beard thing was actually an internal joke, and may be discontinued soon.
Many more features are coming soon. So we have a semi-rating system right now with the like button, but it's not backed with an authentication system so it's only partially effective. We are adding user authentication, so you'll have more from that.
We added a featured site of the day to bake some sort of gamification inside.
Much more stuff on the way. Follow @HumansFyi on twitter for updates or check back soon.
Really loved the site! I wish if there was a comment section so people could discuss about what they like or dislike about the site .
@samrotenberg I can't say for sure. If it does get indexed it will probably be a few days as I got more than a 100 submissions in the last 24 hours and I review each and every one to make sure it's not spam and that it meets some certain quality level. Doing my best to include everyone as fast as I can.
This can also double as a search engine for web designers or developers. When you see what they are doing for themselves, it's a great way to discover someone who can help you with your project.
@malcolmserge That's exactly what I was thinking when making it! I'm thinking about making some functionality to approach the site owner to hire him or her. What do you think?
I like the idea. Things that I would add:
- login feature / personal account to keep things that I like (I'm not sure about where do things I upvote are saved right now)
- commenting
- user photos
@ianlarsen17 Thanks for the feedback.
- Commenting is coming. Already got it up on the dev version. Should be up soon.
- Authentication - I'm kind of hesitating. Currently users' upvotes are saved on Local Storage. I don't want to make things too complicated.
- I actually do pull user photos from social media accounts via API. You can see them when you click on the website screenshot. Maybe I'll incorporate them more tightly in the future. I don't want to make the UI too dense.
Lettuce