Jeffrey Zeldman

What they show

A personal publication ('keeping you informed since 1995') rather than a portfolio: The Daily Report blog, an About page, press, and a subscribe link, with writing organized into categories like Design, Web Standards, Industry and State of the Web, plus a personal column. A 'cornerstone content' section highlights his most significant pieces across the decades. The companies he founded (an agency, a magazine, a conference series) appear as context in the bio rather than as case studies.

Why it works at this level

It's the oldest model of a leadership site, and it still works: build a publication, keep it going, and the institutions you founded become part of the story the publication tells. The cornerstone-content section is the clever bit. It turns thirty years of posts into a curated reading list, so a new visitor gets the ten pieces that matter instead of a wall of archives. The personal column matters too; it's what makes the site a person's rather than a brand's. For founders who wonder whether to keep a blog when they have a company blog, this is the argument for keeping your own.

What to steal

Curate your own archive: pick the handful of pieces that define your thinking and pin them. Keep publishing under your own name even when you run something with its own voice. Let the institutions you built be the bio, and let the writing be the evidence you're still in the game.

What I'd change

One thing I'd push on. Every site here is good; this is the note I'd send the author.

The bio does more of the work than it should; the founding of Happy Cog, A List Apart and An Event Apart is history most younger readers won't know, and one page telling that story would give the archive its frame.