Hey, Dave Bloom here, creator of Yoursellf. Here’s the not-so-short story of why I created this platform.
I’m a web designer and developer, and I’ve spent over a decade making websites as a freelancer.
I have a lot of experience to share, but when it came time to do so, I found that I always got stuck screwing around with fonts, colors, layouts, and other site-builder settings instead of just pulling the trigger and hitting Publish on something simple. I got overwhelmed with ‘design decision fatigue’, and always wondered if there was a better way to share my work, my thoughts, and my discoveries.
(Note: I also noticed that I didn’t seem to have this problem writing impassioned posts/replies on social media, where the input is conveniently constrained to text and links.)
Also, as a teacher and fixer-upper, I’ve seen a lot of websites, and I noticed that a majority of my clients were downright embarrassed to share their personal sites with me (“I’m redoing this, sorry for the mess, the cobbler’s children have no shoes, etc.”). They did their best to build something that looked good, but their platforms gave them too many options to futz with, and they didn’t have the technical know-how (nor the time) to fill in the gaps.
All this complexity felt like the reason why most people don’t have a personal website in the first place. It’s just too much work, so we rely on profile pages on our social networks to represent ourselves. Those networks can be useful in some contexts, but they’re cluttered as hell, have ulterior motives, and they’re not yours. You’re their product, not the other way around.
There’s also the findability factor. Remote work is outrageously competitive, and if you’re just starting out with a web presence, you’ve got a long way to go before even sniffing the front page of Google or having anyone know you exist.
This motivated me to build a platform that made launching your web presence take seconds, and would allow me to immediately list you in a directory where you could be found on the same day that you signed up.
And for your visitors sake: I wanted the endpoints in that directory (member sites) to be lightning fast, fully responsive, fully accessible, but most importantly: as straightforward as possible and free of visual distractions. The information is what matters. “Do you have experience in ______? Can you prove it? Great, how much do you charge and how do I contact you?”
(Other note: I strongly believe that the whole résumé and cover letter dance is an inefficient vestige of old hiring models; your experience should not be constrained to a single sheet of paper, and your work should be made public, not left to die in some poor HR person’s overflowing inbox.)
Yoursellf solves these problems. I’m using it for my personal website going forward, and I’m excited to watch it grow.
Here’s my last point: writing this About page took me about 30 minutes on April 24th, 2024. It’s the longest About page I’ve ever written about anything I’ve ever done (it was initially supposed to be an FAQ answer, but I just kept typing, and here we are). I edited it a bit, but not much. You’re reading this because Yoursellf made it ridiculously easy for me to write and publish it.
So if you’ve got something inside of you that the world needs to hear, and you want to experience what it feels like to write and publish a website as easily as you’d edit a Word document, I highly recommend putting Yoursellf out there and signing up.
Now you know where the name came from. Let’s get you a web presence.
DB