I have spent more than 12 years working in digital marketing and SEO, which means I spend a lot of my working life thinking about the internet.
During that time, I’ve had a front-row seat to some pretty significant changes in how people find and consume information online. Search engines changed. Social feeds took over more of our attention. Algorithms increasingly decided what we should see next. And now AI is changing the way we search, discover things, and interact with information all over again. It’s a strange time to work in search. It’s also a pretty interesting one.
When you spend that much time thinking about the internet professionally, it becomes difficult not to view everything through that lens. Who is this for? How will people find it? What purpose does it serve? How should it perform?
Everything needs a strategy.
With that in mind, the idea of having a small, simple space on the internet that is just mine started to feel increasingly appealing.
Stepping Outside the Feed
I didn’t build this site to launch a personal brand, write thought-leadership pieces, or create another professional portfolio. I wanted somewhere outside of social platforms, employer websites, algorithmic feeds, and professional expectations. Somewhere I could make things, share experiences, put some thoughts into words, and let them exist for longer than a few days in a feed.
A place that doesn’t need to serve a particular metric or fit neatly into what I do for work. That’s what this website is.
No Niche, No Content Calendar
It goes against much of my classic SEO training but this website doesn’t have a narrowly defined niche. Some of what I write here will inevitably be about digital marketing, SEO, AI, and the changing ways people find information online. I’ve spent a big part of my career thinking about those things, and there’s no shortage of interesting questions to explore right now.
But I don’t want this to be a digital marketing website.
I also want to write about books. Golf. Fatherhood. Photography. Movies and TV. Things I’m learning. Experiences worth remembering. Maybe something completely mundane that I can’t stop thinking about. The only real common thread is me: what I’m interested in, what I’m experiencing, and the questions on my mind at any given time.
I spend enough of my professional life thinking about audiences, strategies, and what content is supposed to accomplish. Here, I’m okay not having all the answers. I don’t want every post to be optimized for search, tied to my career, or polished until all the edges are smooth.
The Long Game: Accumulation
One of the things I like most about having a personal website is the idea of accumulation. So much of what we put online now is designed to be consumed quickly and replaced by whatever comes next. You publish something into a feed, it competes for attention for a little while, and then it mostly disappears.
A personal website feels different. It can just accumulate.
Over time, individual posts, photos, ideas, recommendations, and experiences can become an archive. Something I can look back on years from now and see what I was interested in, what I was learning, what was happening in my life, and how my thinking changed along the way. I like the idea of building that slowly.
An Unfinished Experiment
I don’t know exactly what this site will become. I don’t have a content calendar or a publishing schedule. I don’t know what I’ll be writing about a year from now, let alone five years from now.
I’m intentionally trying not to figure all of that out before I start. That uncertainty is part of the appeal.
For now, the goal is much simpler: write things down, share some experiences, make something that belongs to me, and see where it leads.
This is the first one.