I’ve been refreshing the site recently and picked a fixed title and description for every page. In this post I’ll walk through what each one is and why I chose it. For the titles I leaned on Sufi Sözlük (a Turkish dictionary of Sufi vocabulary) as the source of the words I kept coming back to.

Home

I didn’t use any unusual phrase on the home page. I just took the sentence I’d been using before, stripped away the excess and left the essence.

About

For the About page I used Velhasılıkelam. It literally means “in short”, and it’s the word you use to bring a long-winded conversation back to the actual point when the other person starts getting bored. On this page, I treated it as: instead of long sentences, give the essential information directly.

Portfolio

For the Portfolio page I used Emek. I think the word captures all the work I’ve put out. It means “what you spend of your life on a piece of work”. The line underneath tries to summarise the work itself.

27 Before 27

I named my “things I want to do before turning 27” page 27 Before 27. Instead of literally labelling each page, I think it’s nicer — and more educational — when names nudge people to look something up.

Blog

For the Blog page I used İkra — the very first verse of the Qur’an, meaning “Read”. I chose it because we don’t really understand or live by it. The subtitle Bişnev means “listen”; I wanted to pair reading with listening.

Career Talks

For the Career Talks page I used Yol (“path”). I picked it because it captures the path people walk in their careers. The word mahiyet in the subtitle means “essence, true nature” — i.e. choose a job by its essence, not by appearances.