Why Three Sites, Not One
Certainty: Just made the call; it'll take time to prove out
I could have crammed everything into a single site at nshidai.com. I didn’t, because I got clear on one thing: multiple sites only hold up when they truly differ at the level of medium—not when they’re the same content wearing a different coat of paint.
- The storefront is a site for reading: finished essays, professional trust, oriented toward collaboration.
- The garden is a site for writing: process, drafts, learning in public, oriented toward my future self.
- The workshop is a site for making: products, tools, toys—letting the things I build do the talking.
Each asks something different of its visitor (read / wander / play), and none of them competes for the same energy from me—writing an essay, tending a note, and shipping a release are three separate acts. If a new site were just “another place to write,” it would fight the storefront for the same block of time and sooner or later rot half-finished. That test is exactly what I used to rule out several of the candidate plans.
The cost is a wider surface to maintain, so I set myself an iron rule: tend only one place at a time, and do it properly, keeping the rest alive on a low-frequency rhythm.
Belongs to: Building My Own Sites