> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
This is exactly it!
My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
I'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to show my students what my own website looked like when I was their age!
I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your summary. Thanks for the inspiration!