Tidying a Cluttered Homepage — A Day of Subtraction with Claude

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I was having my morning coffee, and I decided to look at my own blog's homepage properly, for the first time in a while. I read it from the top, as a reader would. And I felt a little embarrassed. I had kept adding things to the page over the years, and the result looked like a front hall where shoes, umbrellas and post had been left scattered across the floor.

On that day, I spent from morning until night rebuilding the homepage, together with Claude, the generative AI that has become my partner in this work. I would like to record what I could not do, what I tried, and what changed, including the moments when I got stuck. I hope this will be of some use to anyone who is dealing with clutter of their own, either on a website or in daily life.

The Morning My Own Site Looked Cluttered

Before the rebuild, three separate introductions came immediately below the large photograph at the top of the page: "A New Chapter After 60", "The Purpose of This Blog" and "What's Next". This meant that a reader had to scroll a long way before reaching the articles themselves. Below the introductions was the area for browsing articles, where eleven categories were listed side by side. Below that again were buttons such as "See Reader Letters" and "Sign Up for Updates", together with a card showing a recent letter from a reader.

I had added every one of these elements at some point, because I thought at the time that it would be helpful to have them there. Each one had its own reason for being on the page, and that is exactly why I could no longer decide which ones to remove. It is the same as tidying a house. The things that we chose and bought ourselves are the hardest ones to part with.

An impression of the homepage before the rebuild. The introductions, the many categories, the buttons and the cards all overlap, and a reader cannot tell where to begin.

Before I Started, I Moved Up to a Higher Plan

Before I started this work, I had taken one bold step. I upgraded my Claude subscription from the Pro plan to the Max plan, which is the next level up and gives five times the allowance.

There were two reasons for this. The first was the usage allowance. Over the past month or so, I had been spending more and more time with Claude, because I was posting articles and reworking the site. As a result, I was using up a whole week's allowance in just four or five days. For the remaining days, I could only sit in front of my unfinished work and wait for the allowance to reset. Resuming interrupted work always involves the hassle of remembering where I had stopped. In my case, that hassle becomes greater the longer the gap between sessions.

The second reason was how the work felt to me. Until then, I had been using Sonnet 5, which is the middle model. On the Claude Code side, which works directly with the files of the site, this worked very well. On the chat side, however, where Claude and I decide the instructions together, I had begun to feel that something was missing. The instructions were not precise enough, and problems were not being solved completely. I would move on to the next task while the previous problem was still unresolved. This pattern continued, each piece of work took longer and longer, and to be honest, it was beginning to be a burden on my mind.

So I decided to go ahead with the change. I upgraded to the Max plan, set the chat side to use Opus 5, which is the higher model, at all times, and left Claude Code on Sonnet 5. With that combination, I started the work of that day as an experiment. The cost became about six times what I had been paying before. For someone who lives on a pension, this is not a small amount. I was able to decide because I knew that I can return to the previous plan at any time. When a decision can be reversed, it is quicker to try it once than to keep hesitating.

I noticed the difference almost as soon as I started. Opus 5 found the places where problems were likely to occur, and dealt with them before they became serious. There were more new ideas, and the ideas were more accurate. The replies came faster. Above all, I could give it a task without feeling anxious about the result. In every respect, it was on a different level from before. Because my instructions were more accurate, the amount of work that Claude Code could do also increased, and there were several occasions when Claude Code worked for forty minutes, or almost an hour, without stopping. I was worried that my usage would increase sharply, but in fact the usage was much smaller than I had expected.

It is still only the first day, so it is too early to reach a conclusion. Even so, I am glad that I made the change. This is especially true for a beginner like me, who is not an engineer. The exchanges between Claude in the chat and Claude Code are full of words that I do not know. I copy the instruction that Claude has written, I paste it into Claude Code, I copy the answer that comes back, and I paste it into Claude again. This exchange continues for a long time. Because I do not understand the content well, and because my concentration does not last, I forget the steps that I took a short time before, and I lose track of what I am doing at that moment. I have often found myself in this nightmarish loop. With Opus 5, I have the feeling that it notices where I am stuck, and that it explains things again, one at a time, at my own pace. For me, that is more valuable than speed or cleverness.

Removing Things Is Harder Than Adding Them

While I was thinking about how to tidy the page, I remembered a story about the tea master Sen no Rikyu. Toyotomi Hideyoshi had heard that the morning glories in Rikyu's garden were magnificent, so he came to a tea gathering in order to see them. All the morning glories in the garden had been cut down, and a single flower was arranged in the tokonoma of the tearoom. Rikyu had removed all the other flowers so that this one flower would stand out.

Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591) was the tea master who gave the Japanese tea ceremony the form it still has today, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) was the military ruler who unified Japan in the same period. Rikyu served him. A tokonoma is the shallow alcove of a Japanese room, where a single scroll or one flower arrangement is displayed.

What I most want to show on the homepage is not our introduction. It is the 241 articles that I have written so far. Therefore, after discussing it with Claude, I decided to proceed in the following order. First, I would move the area for browsing articles to a position immediately below the photograph. Next, I would move the reader letters and the sign-up form to the contact page. Finally, I would combine the three introductions into one.

The eleven categories became six tabs: "Daily Life", "Travel", "Mind & Body", "Money & World", "Books & Music" and "Life with AI". In Kampo, some formulas are made from very few ingredients. Shakuyakukanzoto contains only two herbs, peony root and liquorice, and it is said to act quickly on conditions such as muscle cramps. More choice is not always better. Sometimes a remedy reaches the person without hesitation precisely because there are fewer ingredients.

Kampo is the Japanese tradition of herbal medicine. It came from China and then developed in its own way in Japan, and it is still prescribed by doctors there today. Shakuyakukanzoto is the name of one formula within that tradition.

I knew the same problem from my years in the Japanese food business. If we increased the number of dishes on the menu too much, customers took longer to choose, and the amount of preparation in the kitchen also increased. If we do not want readers to feel lost, the person who makes the page has to do the choosing first.

Asking One AI to Check the Other AI's Draft

I decided to add a short description to each of the six tabs. Claude in the chat wrote the first drafts. For example, the description for "Travel" was: "Records of trips around Asia, such as Thailand and the Philippines."

However, I then asked Claude Code, which can read the files of the site directly, to compare these drafts with the actual articles. Claude Code found that there was not a single article about Thailand. On the other hand, there were eighteen articles about cruises and twenty-one articles about hotel stays and food trips within Japan, and the description did not mention either of these. The phrase "analysis of ETFs and individual shares" in the description for "Money & World" also had almost no articles behind it.

AI is very good at writing sentences that sound correct. That is exactly why somebody also has to check whether those sentences match the facts. On this occasion, Claude in the chat suggested how the descriptions might be written, and Claude Code pointed out where the descriptions differed from the actual articles. My role was to listen to both of them and to make the final decision. It is difficult for one person to be the writer and the doubter at the same time, so this division of roles was very reassuring.

What I Noticed Only When I Used My iPhone

After everything looked finished on my computer screen, I opened the page on my own iPhone. Several problems that I had not noticed on the computer appeared immediately.

The first problem was the green notice bar that is fixed to the top of the screen. The titles of the new articles were wrapped onto three lines, and they covered about a quarter of the phone screen. We changed the bar so that a phone shows only one article on one line, and so that any part which does not fit is replaced by an ellipsis.

The second problem was the line breaks in the Japanese descriptions. A phrase which means "outings to castles and hotels" was being divided after the word for "castles". Japanese has no spaces between words, so a browser can begin a new line at almost any character, and this causes that kind of division. We changed the page so that each phrase between two commas is treated as a single unit, and after that the words were no longer divided in the middle.

We also found another problem. When a reader who had closed the notice bar came back to the page, the bar appeared for a moment and then disappeared, and the whole page moved upwards. The measurement for this kind of movement is called Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS. At phone width, the value was 0.0788, which is only just inside the 0.1 that Google regards as "good". We changed the page so that the bar is hidden before anything is drawn on the screen, and the value fell to 0.0006.

The flow of the work on that day. I planned the instructions with Claude in the chat, Claude Code carried out the work, I checked the preview, and what I noticed on my iPhone returned to the conversation. We repeated this loop many times.

Was the English Sign-up Form Broken?

Before moving the sign-up form, I checked the management screen of the form. The Japanese form had fourteen sign-ups, but the English form had none. I could not tell whether there were simply no English readers yet, or whether the form had been broken from the beginning.

At this point, Claude in the chat made a mistake. When it read the address of the form from my screenshot, it mistook a capital "I" for a lower-case "l". Claude Code compared the address with the code of the site, one character at a time, using the number that stands behind each character, and pointed out that the code was correct. Claude in the chat accepted the mistake immediately. In the end, I copied the address with the copy button on the management screen, and I let the two machines compare the addresses. The small lesson of that day is that when the eyes of a human being cannot tell two things apart, we should not use our eyes to check them.

I then made a test sign-up through the English form. The number of submissions changed from zero to one, and the subscriber list recorded the language as "EN". The form had been working correctly from the beginning.

Further on, however, we found a problem that I could not fix. Inside the automated system that sends notifications of new articles, the English route was not connected to the trigger that starts it, so it had never run even once. In order to fix this, I needed to divide the system into two parts. The management screen was difficult for me to follow, and I stopped part of the way through. There are no English readers at the moment, so nobody is inconvenienced. I decided to deal with it when the first English subscriber appears, and I stopped there for the day. I believe that choosing not to continue with something that I do not understand is also an important decision.

Why I Stopped Writing "Aged 66 and 61"

When I combined the three introductions into one, I changed the phrase "aged 66 and 61" in the homepage introduction to "a couple in our sixties". An age begins to be out of date at the moment when it is written. It has to be corrected after every birthday, and if I forget to correct it, readers are shown old information. There is a Buddhist idea that nothing stays as it is. If we try to fix something that keeps changing by writing it down, the words will not fit the reality at some point.

The Buddhist idea here is called shogyo mujo in Japanese. It holds that every thing in this world is always changing, and that nothing keeps its form for ever.

When I read the six headings that describe the purposes of this blog again, they also seemed abstract. I therefore replaced them with everyday Japanese words, and they now say: sharing what we experienced a little ahead of others, looking at ageing with fresh eyes, sharing ideas that have helped us in daily life, connecting Japan and Britain, valuing the act of writing things down, and walking gently beside those who are on the same path. The English headings were already clear, so I left them as they were.

I also reviewed the body text. Over the past few years, I myself have found it harder to follow small letters with my eyes. In the evening, pale grey letters look particularly blurred. This site is written for people of my own generation, and yet the introduction was set in exactly that kind of small, pale grey type. We made the letters one size larger and darker, so that they stand out more clearly from the background, and we kept the lines short enough for the eye to follow comfortably.

The Address Written on the Back of the Photograph

The last task was the large photograph at the top of the homepage. It had been borrowed from the internet, and I decided to replace it with photographs that we had taken ourselves. I collected fifty-nine of our photographs in a folder on my computer, and I selected twenty-eight of them, so that one photograph is shown at random on each visit. Autumn leaves in Kyoto, Big Ben in London, the roses in our garden and the raspberries now take turns every time the page is opened.

Something surprised me while we were preparing the photographs. When Claude Code examined them, it found that fifty-six of the fifty-nine contained location data, which is a record of the place where each photograph was taken. A photograph taken with a smartphone can hold the latitude and longitude of that place, in a form that we cannot see, inside the file.

If I compare this with an old printed photograph, it is like giving prints to strangers while our home address is still written on the back. If we look only at the front of the photograph, we notice nothing at all. We made sure that the only images placed on the site are converted copies from which the location data has been removed.

To be safe, I also asked for a check of the 3,623 images that were already published on the site, and four of them still contained location data. We removed only the location data, by a method that does not reduce the image quality, and we added a system so that from now on, if a photograph with location data is included by mistake, publication stops automatically before the photograph appears. One small worry that I used to feel every time I added photographs to an article has now disappeared.

An impression of the homepage after the rebuild. It is now arranged in this order: our own photograph, the six tabs, and a single introduction. The lower right shows the change in the speed score on a computer, and the removal of the location data from the photographs.

The Changes of One Day, in Numbers

I compared the scores of Google's page speed check, PageSpeed Insights, before and after the work. The performance score on a computer rose from 68 to 89, and the "Best Practices" score, which shows how soundly the site is built, rose from 77 to 100. The "Best Practices" score on a phone is also 100. The performance score on a phone, however, remained at 55. That test assumes a slow connection and judges strictly, and the cause lies in the structure of the page as a whole, which is a separate problem from the changes of this day. Not everything improves in a single day, and I would like to record that honestly.

In the middle of the tidying, I remembered GOV.UK, the website of the British government. One of its design principles is "Do less", and its body text is set in a generous size. What comes first there is that everyone can reach the information they need without getting lost. Japanese websites, by contrast, are often said to place as much information as possible on a limited screen. Both approaches have their merits. However, our site belongs to a life that is lived in two countries, and what I want to put first is that neither our Japanese readers nor our English readers are left feeling lost.

What Learning with Generative AI Brings to Later Life

Keeping the Mind and Body in Order

The work lasted from morning until night, but strangely, I was not left with heavy tiredness. I think this is because we did not try to finish everything at once. We moved forward in small stages: looking into the problem, reading the suggestion, checking the preview, and publishing to the live site. I feel that my concentration and my memory are weaker than before. However, when the work is divided into stages, I do not lose track of my progress, even if I take a rest in the middle. I could also ask about any unfamiliar word immediately, without hesitation, and that made the day easier for me.

Why I Continue, Even Though It Costs Money

As I wrote earlier, from that day the monthly fee became about six times what it had been. For someone who lives on a pension, this is an amount that I feel every month. I continue nonetheless, because if I asked a professional company to do the same work, it would cost far more, and I would finish without understanding what had actually changed. When I work together with AI, it explains each step and the reason for that step. What I am buying with my money is not the work itself. It is time in which I can move forward while I understand things with my own hands. Moreover, when the quality of that time improves, the same work takes fewer days. It is probably not correct to decide whether something is expensive by looking only at the monthly fee.

New Encounters That Add Colour to Daily Life

One of the reasons that I began this tidying was a letter from a reader who had found this blog through Yukihiro Kitano's newsletter. The reader pointed out that some articles showed dates in the future. When I realised how carefully readers look at small details, I sat up straight. Through the automated sign-up system, and through the location data hidden in photographs, I also meet things that I am learning for the first time at this age. Encounters with readers I have never met, and encounters with new knowledge, give a small sense of purpose to each day.

Closing Thoughts: Cutting the Canes That Have Borne Fruit

With summer-fruiting raspberries, once the picking is finished, we cut the canes that bore the fruit down to the base, because those canes will not bear fruit again in the following year. When we cut them, sunlight reaches the new canes that have grown up, and this leads to the harvest of the next year.

The introduction sections and the buttons that I removed from the homepage all did their work well in their own time. By thanking them and letting them go, I believe that readers will now find it easier to notice the articles that I write from now on.

This record is also a piece of writing that travels in one direction, addressed to someone I will probably never meet. Even if the words travel in only one direction, if they can stay quietly close to the heart of the person who reads them, I believe that this is a true form of walking beside another person.