Your Physical Appearance is a Landing Page

I recently took up the challenge of rebuilding my personal portfolio website to look more professional, roughly a week ago. While rebuilding and mulling over what exactly makes your website look professional and curated, I had a particularly odd shower thought. I had this uncanny feeling that your physical appearance is essentially a landing page for your personality and who you are as an individual.

Ok, hear me out.

Let’s start with a color scheme. While I haven’t worn uniforms or suits since middle school, whenever the Instagram algorithm throws a posh content creator’s reel my way, I can see that there’s these impressions that the color of your suit gives others. As a result, people curate their appearance to look a certain way to evoke a certain feeling in their clientele. However, suits are more on the professional side so that’s not that bad.

Moving on to personal fashion, not the kind that influencers and fashionistas love, but the general attire someone wears. You’d assume someone who wears a T-shirt with strongly worded slogans would be an interesting fellow or one of the most unfuriating people you’d meet with little in-between. Inversely, if you meet someone who’s wearing a plain, pastel colors, you’d assume they’re a relaxed, or at the very least outwardly calm individual. If you meet someone who has a punk aesthetic, you’d probably assume they’re fun at parties (notice how I didn’t describe their aesthetic but you got an idea of them just from that).

All these notions already exist, and people use it as a signal to make conversations easier and smoother for others like them, possibly making them more approachable. As a result, fashion statements and overall appeance are a way of expressing yourself to the world: when people walk by you, they get an idea of who you are at a first glance. While a lot of people don’t really care much for it on a conscious level, they possibly might do so subconsciously. Perhaps liking black clothes results from someone not liking to be the center of attention while those wearing flamboyant colors thrive in it.

While I dislike generalizing people and making assumptions, the same doesn’t apply to the world of Web Design. You’ll already generalize websites, where you’d spot vibe-coded websites from a mile away while one that has been curated painstakingly would be very obvious. So I took the shower thought and expanded on it a bit, and made a couple generalizations:

• People who curate their appearance are essentially people who would want an awesome landing page that looks cool.
• People with a cool fashion sense would typically know what looks good and what doesn’t, and would be able to tell apart mass-produced, manufactured websites from ones that actually look good.
• People who lack both the fashion sense and the desire to curate their appearance typically wouldn’t care much.

With all due respect to other engineers, being one myself who also does not curate my appearance and aren’t fashionable by any means, I motion to the reason why a lot of solopreneurs don’t care much about landing pages; and why specifically those with a focus on system architecture, backend design and generally the unseen, but elegant parts of engineering think a vibe-coded, generic-looking website is perfectly sufficient.

That’s because, another generalization (one more reminder that I do not generally partake in it, but do so for the purpose of this blog post), they think the results speak for themselves but it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s essentially a way of expressing yourself to the outside world, to people who could possibly want to buy your products. While yes, a discovery call and a demo and client reviews/referrals would end up making it work, the landing page looking overall clean, fashionable and unique would go a long way to make it seem “approachable” the same way you would curate your appearance.

In a world where anyone could make a working website by chatting to an overly-eager assistant, what would actually make websites and the SaaS behind them actually different and feel legit, would be the degree of curation and what’s typically regarded Product Development. This isn’t to be mistaken with Software Development, because software cares about usability and a gajillion different things people would nitpick my post about if I stated them.

So those are the shallow parallels I drew between physical appearance and Web Design, and why people who dress better could be better Product Engineers in the tech scene.