A personal domain accumulates versions of its owner. There are abandoned layouts, half-finished portals, small scripts that outlived their explanation, and folders named with the confidence that future-you will understand them.
Recovery before reinvention
The instinct is to clean everything immediately. The safer first move is to recover the site as evidence: identify what is public, what still receives traffic, what contains private material, and which paths other systems may still expect.
Mess is not a reason to upload a second layer of mess. It is a reason to separate the buildable source from the hosting archaeology.
Keep the signal
Old pages are rarely worth reproducing pixel for pixel, but they contain durable fragments: an owl, a mountain, a strange phrase, a link that reveals what mattered at the time.
The useful redesign question is not “How do I modernise this template?” It is “Which parts still feel like me, and what new system gives them room to become clearer?”
A domain as a living index
The new site does not need to flatten every project into identical cards. It can behave like a map: one central signal with distinct territories for products, experiments, writing, and recovered matter.
A personal website is allowed to be useful, unfinished, and a little difficult to categorise. That may be the point.
The archive is not the site’s basement. It is the geological layer that makes the current surface believable.