Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure, "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-flagellation.