I used to always, always stress about my personal website. I needed it to look sexy and be crazy and wild. And I needed to keep it updated all the time. I tried Squarespace, Webflow, Framer, all of it. But I couldn’t find a platform that could things the way I wanted.
And then I came across this motherfucking website and I decided to do something similar. Get rid of all the bullshit. No frameworks. No styling. No animations. Not even javascript. I design beautiful websites all day long and I thought, why not try something new for my own site, because after all, “good design is as little design as possible,” isn’t it?
So this is where I landed. A super simple, static website. All it needs is a single JSON file with my project details, which gets pulled in at build time. And then I started using a skill I created in Cursor to actually do the updates. I’d say “add a new project” and it would walk me through what it needed, then add it, then I’d commit and ship. Easy peasy right?
Well, then I thought, I could make this even easier. And thus, Porto was born. A super simple website builder that does things the way I do them, with no fluff, no bs, no frills. You tell Porto to do something, like add a project, edit a project, adjust some fields, change the link colour, update the favicon, and it does it. Don’t want to chat? No problem, the visual editor gets you where you need to go. When you’re ready, commit and publish to your own subdomain.
Porto is now in a working public beta, so please try it out and let me know if it’s working for you at hey@bysam.fun. Keep in mind that things will break and new features will come, but try it all the same.
There’s a few hard limits for beta users, but if you want to push the limits, shoot me a message and I can lift them for you. If this goes anywhere, I may start a subscription model, but we’ll see.
