I created this website in summer 2025, the latest in a line of personal sites stretching back to 1999. Each has been some mixture of professional profile, personal storytelling, and a way to connect with people who might want to work together.

Before social media

Those early websites existed in a different internet. Before Facebook and Twitter, your homepage was genuinely your home online, a place where people could discover who you were and what you cared about. My sites featured holiday photos, tales of nights out, and emerging professional interests. You can still find them on the Wayback Machine, which is both nostalgic and slightly mortifying.

There was a small cohort of us young enough to embrace putting everything online in the late 90s, but old enough that we didn't start with social media. We were experimenting with the instinct to share stories of our lives. That same instinct would later fuel Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

The dormant years

When I closed Human in 2019, I quickly built a freelance site at charltonkillen.com. It was functional but timid—I didn't really know what story I was telling. After joining One+All as Technology Director, I let the site go dormant rather than pay for hosting I wasn't using.

For several years, charltonkillen.com was just a dead link.

Why rebuild now

I've concluded that if I'm not using social media (the harms outweigh the benefits for me) I still need a way to share ideas and connect with people. When someone asks what I'm working on or wants to know more after meeting me at an event, it's useful to have somewhere to point them.

I also realised I had stories worth telling, and that modern tools could help me build exactly what I wanted without the overhead of subscription services or platforms that don't quite fit.

Building with Claude

I decided to work with Claude who acted as a blend of front-end developer, teacher and therapist. We explored static site generators and settled on Eleventy, hosted on GitHub Pages for simplicity and cost. Claude authored the HTML and CSS whilst I provided feedback and tested across devices.

Over about ten days, we iterated through dozens of versions. Claude was endlessly patient with my questions and technically competent enough to achieve the clean, institutional aesthetic I wanted, inspired by gov.uk, Margaret Calvert's design work, and the principle that form should follow function.

What I learned

This 'partnership' worked where previous attempts had failed. I refreshed some Git and CSS knowledge but mostly focused on content and user experience. Having an AI collaborator that never gets frustrated with basic questions or repeated requests made the difference.

The result is a site I'm genuinely happy with. It's clean, fast, easy to maintain, and authentically mine. It reflects my belief that good design creates space for people to find their own meaning rather than imposing the designer's style.

Most importantly, it's back online and ready for whatever conversations might emerge from it.