Little touches that make my website truly mine

I've always loved when people had super clean personal websites, so when I migrated my blog from Ghost to 11ty, mine started out the same way — minimal & elegant, without a whole lot else design‑wise. But as much as I love simplicity, I also wanted it to feel more me, especially as I started thinking of it as more than just a blog. That's why over time, I've added small touches here and there — colors, fonts, little details — that reflect me & my personality. And, to be honest, I might not ever stop.

The first personal touch on my site has been there from the start: the beautiful teal accent color. It used to be a darker shade of teal, but now it's a tad lighter for my personal preference. Right now, teal is my favorite color (though that tends to change every few years, lol), so it makes a lot of sense to me to have it as the accent color for my webpage.

I also love using fonts to show my personality in small ways. The main body font is one of my favorites: Inter. It's a simple sans serif, but I tweaked a few settings. Notice the capital "I" has proper stems and doesn't look like a lowercase L. And the lowercase "l" has a little curve at the end. If you're using a screen reader, reader mode, or hearing me speak this out loud on my website, then this sentence won't make sense — but just know I'm not crazy.

But the other font on my site — the handwritten one — is the most interesting. That's because it's actually my own handwriting (I tried to write neat, though). I did this because someone's handwriting is very personal to them, so it felt like a perfect touch to add to my webpage.

A newer personal touch on my site is audio. You can actually hear me read my own blog posts out loud. It's a personal website, and what's more personal than someone's voice? Of course, I had to take it a step further and sync the on‑page text with my voice. It was a pain in the ass to implement, and after a solid day, I finally found a solution that was "good enough," but I'm glad I put it in there. It's a fun feature that you don't see on everyone's personal website.

And even as I'm writing this post, I've added some more elements to my website to display my personality. I spent a solid couple of hours getting a really nice teal-blue textured gradient footer on the site, inspired by a bunch of fun gradients I keep seeing on Pinterest.

I also added a little blue butterfly icon, inspired by things I kept seeing on Pinterest as well.

I realized that I saved tons of fun design ideas on Pinterest (that's mostly what I use it for), but I rarely use them as inspiration for anything. They just sit there, even though they feel very "me." That's what led me to add the butterfly icon and the gradient footer to my site.

My website will likely never be "finished," at least not in a traditional sense. But honestly, that's the beauty of it. It's constantly evolving; it creates a place for me to mess around and grow over time, with it growing right there alongside me. And even though I update it often, each change is less about perfection, and more about making the site a truer reflection of me.