What happens when 21 people who build their own websites — by hand, for fun, and on their own terms — gather in one room? On July 1, the Faculty of Design at Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm found out, hosting a special edition of the Homebrew Website Club Nürnberg as part of the Nürnberg Digital Festival.
Homebrew Website Club (HWC) is a regular meetup of the international IndieWeb community — people who believe the web is at its best when you own your content, publish on your own domain, and treat your personal website as a creative medium rather than a profile in someone else’s platform. HWC Nürnberg usually meets in a smaller circle; for the festival edition, the room filled up quickly.
An international evening
The festival brought a international crowd to the faculty: guests from the US, Iran, Hong Kong, and many other countries joined local regulars — reason enough to switch the evening’s language to English. Among the participants were long-time IndieWeb figures such as Tantek Çelik and capjamesg, fresh from the IndieWebCamp held in Nuremberg the weekend before.
After a short introduction to the Homebrew Website Club format by host Tilman, the group did what HWC does best: a show-and-tell of personal websites. One browser tab at a time, the projector cycled through blogs, portfolios, digital gardens, and experiments — from an accessibility specialist’s practice, to a hiking club’s community site, to a coffee blog, to generative art portfolios. No two sites looked alike, which is rather the point.
A highlight came from Björn Stierand, who demoed an as-yet-unpublished feature of his website: the header image and intro text change according to his daily fitness, with data collected by his fitness wristband and pulled in via the Google Health API at build time. A website, in other words, with a pulse.
Why websites matter for designers
Personal websites are small, complete design problems: identity, typography, interaction, tone of voice, and technology, all owned by one person. The evening was a live showcase of exactly the kind of independent, idiosyncratic web practice we want our students to encounter — and, ideally, to join.
After the presentations, drinks were opened and the room dissolved into lively conversations that lasted well into the evening.
Homebrew Website Club Nürnberg meets regularly, every second Wednesday of the month — the next session is already next week, and everyone curious about the IndieWeb is welcome. Details and upcoming dates: https://homebrew-website.club
Event documentation: indieweb.org/events/2026-07-01-hwc-nuremberg
