Sites that belong to a person rather than a platform. No cookie banner, no newsletter modal, no engagement loop — just someone’s stuff, on their own domain, in a layout they chose. mitxela.com is the archetype: it loads instantly, it’s been there for years, and it is unmistakably one person’s.
The appeal isn’t nostalgia for worse tools. It’s that ownership changes what gets written. On a platform you write what performs; on your own site you write what you actually think, including the unfinished and the niche, because nothing is measuring you.
The technical side follows from that rather than the other way round. Fast and small isn’t an aesthetic here, it’s the natural result of not having anything to sell — nobody adds three tracking scripts to a page they made for themselves. Which is its own kind of useful constraint.
The honest tension: a site nobody visits is also a site nobody visits. The small web trades reach for permanence and control, and that’s a real trade, not a free win. Worth making on purpose, not by accident.
SantiagoHalf the reason this portfolio exists at all, honestly. See Write up the process, not just the result.