Personal website templates
Four complete websites for a person rather than a company, built in Astro 7 and Tailwind 4 — a writing journal with sixteen finished essays, a travel scrapbook, a photographer’s portfolio and a couple’s wedding site. Each is a finished site with its archive, series and standing pages already built, so you can see how it behaves full before you have filled it.
Every name shown is invented and the demos are the templates themselves, running. You buy the source through private GitHub access, change the copy, and deploy it anywhere static — no subscription, no platform, and it is still yours in ten years. One licence covers unlimited sites, your own or a client's. $49 each, or all 62 templates for $199.
- In this set
- 4
- Each
- $49
- Sites per licence
- Unlimited
- Third-party requests
- 0
The 4 builds
Each is loud in exactly one channel — display type, palette, a moving set-piece, texture or the imagery — and deliberately quiet in the other three. That rule is what stops a set like this reading as one layout in different paint. Click any of them to read the build in full and open the live demo.
VERSAL
Writing / reading journal
Loud
Display type
Postmarked
Travel journal
Loud
Texture
BRANTHOLM
Photographer / creative portfolio
Loud
Imagery
HARRIET & IVO
Couple's wedding site
Loud
Display type
1 of these 4 is free.
What personal & writing sites have to carry
Every build in this set ships all of it. It is the difference between a template that looks finished and one that is.
- 01 An archive that already exists
- The writing build ships sixteen finished essays and six series pages. A template that ships one lorem post hides every problem a real archive creates — which index rules look wrong at length, how a one-word title breaks, what a series page is for.
- 02 A grouping layer above the reverse chronology
- Series, a shelf, collections. It is what stops a personal site being an undifferentiated pile of posts sorted by date, and it is the single most-skipped feature in blog themes.
- 03 Ownership, not a subscription
- Static HTML on a domain you control. No monthly fee, no platform that changes its terms, nothing to migrate off later. For a site meant to outlast a job or a decade, this is the whole argument.
- 04 Type that is actually set
- Line-based reveals rather than character typing, a measure chosen and defended, a reading rule that tracks the set text. These are sites about words, and the typography is treated as the product.
- 05 A colophon or an about that is not a stub
- How the site is made, who is writing, what the shelf holds. On a personal site the meta-pages are content, not administrivia.
- 06 A way to earn, if you want one
- A print edition, a services and prices page, a registry. Not every personal site needs to make money, but the ones that do should not have to bolt it on afterwards.
What every build includes
- Astro 7 · static output, no client framework
- Tailwind 4 · one @theme block holds the palette
- Content in typed files under src/data
- MDX blog collection, wired to the sitemap
- Self-hosted woff2 — no Google Fonts request
- Zero third-party requests · strict CSP-ready
- Vitest + Playwright suites in the repository
- Designed 404, sitemap, canonicals, per-route meta
- Private GitHub repo access, with updates
Questions
Do I have to delete sixteen essays before I can use the writing build?
You delete a directory of .mdx files. They are there so the index, the series pages and the scrubbed rules have something real to behave against. It takes a minute, and you will have seen how the site works at full size first.
Which one for a straightforward personal blog?
The writing build — it is the one designed for years of publishing, with series, a shelf and an archive structure. The travel journal is the smaller, more visual sibling, better if your posts are mostly photographs.
A wedding site is not really a personal website.
It is the most personal one in the catalog — a site for two people and one day, built to be owned rather than rented from a wedding platform, with an RSVP path and a notes feed for updates as the date approaches. It is here because the alternative is renting a slot on a platform that will delete it.
Do I need to know Astro?
It helps, but the common case is editing content and colour. Posts are .mdx files, content lives in typed objects under src/data, colour lives in one @theme block. Deploying is a static folder — Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and Vercel all take it as-is.
Can I use one template for several sites?
Yes. The licence is per buyer, not per project — build as many sites as you like, for yourself or for clients. You may not resell the source itself as a template or starter kit.
Other sets
All 62 templates, $199
Every template here plus every future one, delivered as private GitHub repository access with updates. Single templates are $49 each — the 4 on this page alone are $196 bought separately.