Work profiles 2: the personal webpages

Online presence

TL;DR: websites are mostly useful for having a controlled online presence. This sounds like BS business jargon (and it probably is) but basically the point is to have an online portal where people can easily find information about you. This could be the bare minimum like your current email and links to academic profiles (e.g. Google Scholar, Github, ORCID, etc.) so that people can easily check your work and contact you if needed.

You can of course go a bit further and add links to the institutional website, social media accounts. As well as having a bit more description about your work (e.g. what topics you’re interested in). The whole point again, is that when people web search your name, they can easily find that website and get the information they need. This can be particularly helpful when you’re about to finish your PhD and onwards: it can be used for people that want to hire you, send you papers to review, invite you to give talks, etc.

The main point here is that by having your own website you can always control what information goes on it and when. You can always have a profile on your current lab webpage or on the university official webpage but this has two main disadvantages:

• it’s temporary: unfortunately, because of the transcience of early career academia, you are very likely to leave the lab/change university at some point. But people still want to find your profile!
• it’s cumbersome: whether it’s your lab webpage or the university one, it’s usually not that easy to edit/add things to it: your PI will probably busy and the university template is probably set in stone (and bought for a hefty price!).

Having your own webpage (and to some extent, your own email address) avoids all these problems!

A nicer version of your CV

But what to put on your webpage? Again, the bare minimum should be name, email and academic profiles. But it can be much more! Another advantage of personal websites is to keep track of where you are and what you are doing (e.g. when you’re moving around) and thus can be used for you and people that want to know about you as a nicer/longer version of your CV. It can be use to advertise different things about you depending on career level. For example if you’re late PhD/Postdoc, it allows you to showcase your work for future recruiters. If you’re a PI you can use it to advertise recruitment opportunities.

The classic information people put it:

• a brief summary about yourself
• a longer summary of your research (this often covers different aspects, i.e. different topics)
• a list of your publications and/or your CV
• a contact page
• some bonus pages about other things you do around academia: outreach, natural history hobbies, etc. (often it’s pictures for some reasons).

But mainly it can be used as a better more usable repository of all the things you’ve done in the past (as opposed to the CV that has less flexibility). For example, people put their teaching materials, tutorials, resources (sometimes random pdfs of papers not accessible otherwise), etc.

Making your webpage

It might looking daunting but it’s actually pretty easy and doesn’t need much or need to be especially good looking for getting it starting! Again, having your name, current email address and links to your academic profiles is probably already good enough! If you want to get started you can use proprietary tools and for profit companies (just web search “creating a website” and find the best/cheapest solution for your objectives). Alternatively, you can also follow our previous macrofun tutorial on how to do it yourself and open source here.