The start of a new semester, year, or season is a great time to finally build that personal academic website you’ve been putting off. Maybe you just haven’t had the time, maybe you didn’t know what to include, or maybe the process seemed too intimidating.
Here are some tips on how to get started building a website that showcases the awesome work you do as an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, community member, and cultural producer.
Why build a personal academic website
Your website serves as a central hub for information about your work. Your department or graduate school page is a good start, but departmental pages usually don’t allow you to quickly and easily make changes or updates without going through a university IT department. And because they usually have to confirm to the design of the department or university website, such pages offer you limited options for layout, content, images, and integrations. Building your own site gives you complete control over these things.
Your own site also allows you to express your work in precisely the way you want to do so. You’re not bound by the department categories or terminology, which are designed to solidify the department or university’s brand.
On a personal academic website you can describe your research the way you want to, market your fabulous new book, highlight all the projects your want, blog about current events, and explain the stakes of why you do what you do (i.e., why it matters in the universe) in ways erased by the research/teaching/service triad.
To get started
There are two ways to build a website:
- use an all-in-one platform that offers both a domain name and hosting (most of these options are free)
- buy a domain name, build one yourself or pay someone else to do it, and install it on a paid hosting platform you find
In this post, I’ll focus on the first option to get you started.
Choose a free platform you like to build and host your website. Some user-friendly options include:
None of these options require any coding knowledge—by dragging and dropping some images and video, typing some text, and picking a font, you can have a personal academic website up in a few hours.
Brainstorm what you want to include on your site
You might be tempted to just reproduce your CV on your website. Avoid this impulse! Your work in the world is much more interesting than even the best CV implies.
This is your chance to present the work you do and why it matters to the universe both within and beyond academia. You’re not bound to the research/teaching/service triad, even though you can and should certainly showcase those areas on your site.
Think of your website as a snazzier, more cohesive, and more holistic version of your CV.
So what to include? Here are some ideas that may apply, depending on your fields:
- A professional biography and headshots of you
- Descriptions of your courses and links to their syllabi or course websites
- Abstracts of and links to all your publications—books, podcasts, academic journal articles, magazine articles, op-eds, blog posts, newsletter articles, statements, white papers, online forums, etc.
- Photos and videos of you speaking at various events, along with descriptions of and/or slides from your talks
- News and upcoming events, like those on your academic book tour
- Community or activist projects you’re involved with
- An academic service or leadership statement explaining what kind of service/advocacy work you are committed to, along with a list of and links to your work in this area
- Links to or audio recordings of interviews you’ve given on podcasts, in newspapers, or for blogs
- Films, TV episodes, digital projects, or any other creative work you’ve produced that are relevant to your professional endeavors
- Social media links to the accounts you keep public and want folks to follow you on (don’t include links to social media accounts you keep private or don’t want colleagues connecting with you through)
- Reviews of your work—book reviews, book blurbs, testimonials
- A contact page
- And finally, your CV
Choose a theme
WordPress, Strikingly, and Squarespace all offer a variety of visual themes that organize the content you upload to your site. Choose one that projects the feel that you’d like your professional site to convey. You also have the option to purchase a theme if you can’t find a free one you like.
When choosing a theme, make sure it has options to include the content that you want on your site. Some themes are better for visuals, some excel at audio, and some showcase written content best.
Some things to consider
Links, images, audio, and video
Use these liberally. Interactivity is one of the main benefits of a website over a textual CV, so embrace it! If you list a talk you gave last month, add a video or audio recording of your talk or an image of the event flier.
When listing your published books, include a clear link to where people can buy each book. You can link to the book’s page on the publisher’s website, or to a bookstore site where people can purchase the book.
For podcasts, articles, blog posts, or other publications, add a link for those as well.
Make sure to follow copyright law when using images—either find ones that are available for use under Creative Commons licenses or create your own images with free programs like Canva.
Biography
If the author bio you usually use for speaking engagements and cover letters is more than a few months old (or somebody else wrote it), take this opportunity to compose a new bio for your website. Don’t just copy and paste the bio from your department’s faculty page.
In addition to introducing you to folks who visit your website, you can also use this bio for speaking events, social media profiles (abbreviated of course), grant applications, cover letters, online profiles, and other professional endeavors.
Additionally, if you are hired to give a talk at an event, organizers will probably copy and paste it into marketing materials they create (although it is definitely not good practice, many event organizers don’t ask speakers for photos or bios, choosing instead to just Google around and pull whatever they find off the internet). The bio should stand alone as an object that contains all the pertinent information necessary for a reader to understand who you are, what you do, and why your work matters.
A personal academic website, one that you own and control, is enormously helpful in getting word out about your various projects and giving colleagues (and potential colleagues) an overview of who you are and what you do. It also allows them to contact you for speaking engagements, collaborations, or other professional opportunities.
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