For the past few months, I've been building a personal website design inspiration gallery that curates creative and expertly crafted personal websites from across the internet. The project is called Citizens of the Internet.
I've been a personal website nerd for a long time. I've had my own personal website for several years, and I've been a fan of others' personal websites and have long kept track of and followed different individuals' personal websites and blogs.
I've also been aware of and been a fan of other gallery-type websites for some time. There's One Page Love, a gallery that curates one-page websites, Footer, a collection of nicely designed footers of different websites, and Minimal Gallery, which collects minimalist websites from across the web. There's a few others, but I've long been aware of these different types of web inspiration gallery websites.
So I had an idea a little while back: what if I created my own gallery specifically for personal websites? I did a little research and couldn't find any existing gallery focused specifically on personal websites only. Some galleries, like One Page Love, have a section for personal websites, but those are personal websites that are specifically one page. So I looked and did a little research, and it seemed like this wasn't a thing, it was missing. I thought, "You know what? Why don't I go ahead and give this a try and build this?"
That's the origin of how the project started. I began curating the list of websites that I wanted to feature and started building from there.
I had a few false starts. I first built the project in a really non-scalable way without even using a backend database, so I kind of started building it and then abandoned it. Then I moved on to another project, but then circled back. On the second go-around, I decided to do it the right way and did some more research on what tools and what architecture I needed to implement to build it in a scalable way. This type of gallery website does require an eye towards scalability. It doesn't have to be perfect right off the bat, but there's going to be a lot of images and a lot of content, and you want to build it the right way. I used Next.js and other tools and found Supabase as the best option for me to use for a database, and I rebuilt it.
What the Gallery Features
The gallery features personal websites from all different kinds of people, including software developers, entrepreneurs, founders, writers, rappers, authors, and investors.
Each website has its own feature page, and on the feature page it includes a profile picture of the person, a brief bio of who the person is, and some categories specific to their personal website. The categories include the person's profession or different professions, the features of their personal website (minimal, content-rich, dark mode) and the platform that the website is built with. And finally, the features include some images of the website, the URL of the website, and a link to easily navigate over to the person's website.
Why I Chose to Build This
It really came down to curiosity, seeing if there was something like this out there and then realizing there wasn't, and realizing I had the ability to build something like this. That's one.
Two, it felt like a good challenge for me. I'm not really a software developer by trade or by background, or a web developer. I had some very basic skills and understanding of web development going into this, so I saw it as an opportunity to hone my skills a bit more in building a project like this. This was the first project where I actually implemented a backend database and backend architecture, and it was an opportunity to also utilize the latest AI tools to help me, which have been incredibly helpful.
Number three is I see this project as definitely having high potential to make money and generate revenue. I don't think it's something that is going to be massive, or could be massive, it has a relatively smaller total addressable market, but I know for a fact that other gallery websites like One Page Love, for instance, make good revenue. I think the founder of that gallery, Rob Hope, makes a full-time living off of the project, and I know I can definitely monetize Citizens. Specifically, I'm going to focus on offering personal website templates on the gallery to start. I think it can definitely generate some extra revenue for me as a side project, and it's going to take some time to build up to that, but I think I can get there.
The last reason I'd say is that I really enjoy working on projects like this, and this one in particular is very personal to me (pun intended). As someone who's a personal website and design nerd, I like to nerd out on this kind of stuff. It scratches that itch for me, quenches my curiosity, and it's something that could be valuable to others, for design inspiration and building or updating their own personal website.
So that's the origin story behind Citizens of the Internet. If you have any questions about the project or would like to get in touch with me or have your site featured on the gallery, I would love to hear from you!
