personal site

[philstudent1991]

For those that have a personal site, any advice on where to make one? I want one for a picture, about me, CV and maybe a link to a sample or something.

[PRising]

Google sites is commonly used. 

[GeoDUDE!]

weebly

[PhD applicant]

No one responded to me when I tried a thread about this so I'll respond to you. My university has an ePortfolio host they purchased for their students and faculty to use. I'm going to use it to build the most awesome self-promotional site of all time, download it as a package and then upload it to my own host of choice, probably Google.The only reason I want to Google is because they have better privacy options, and for my ePortfolio, which will have copious amounts of personal information, I only want to have it accessible to the people on the admissions committees. Then I can also hook it up to other things owned by Google, like a personal blog, which I would make public, and my YouTube account, which I will host and post videos from and can have a channel on for self-promotional activity. I've thought a lot about this and am still refining my plans, but needless to say I will be doing a lot of work over the summer. Google sites is a little clunky to manage, but there's an option to plug in raw html code, so I will probably be doing that quite a bit because I want my site to rock more than their templates allow for rock-age. I like some of the peeps sites on this forum, and I think it makes them look cool, so I'm doing it to look cool too. It may not work out that way, but that is my intention.

[TakeruK]

I host my research website (i.e. my photo, my research interests, my CV, mini bio etc.) on my department's servers. I prefer an address like:

 

http://dept.school.edu/~myname 

 

over something like http://www.wix.com/username or a google sites / other commercial website host.

 

I am able to do basic CSS/HTML coding if I have a good template, and I strongly recommend the ones from http://andreasviklund.com/ if you are in the same situation as me. Maybe it's field dependent, but every department I've been to has IT people who will help you figure out how to host your own page. You can use software such as Dreamweaver (or its free variants) to code up a website without actually having to write any code (like a word processor). 

 

I think Google Sites, Weebly, or Wix is better than nothing if you don't have the resources above though. But if you can host it on your departmental's server, I would also suggest paying the monthly fees for something like Wix so that you can get your own files and put them whereever you want, instead of having to have Wix and its ads on your pages!

[PhD applicant]

My school has quite a tech support team for faculty and students, so there's a lot of help available as well. They also have a lot of good ideas for resources, since all they do is nerd out all day long looking for apps and ways to help people, going to conferences and learning about new stuff. So I would say to look around your campus for some helpful staff as well. You never know what you are going to find, hidden in a forgotten floor of some crappy old building; a whole department of tech shut-ins that are just waiting to help you.

[MattDest]

A friend designed mine for me, but I would recommend Google Sites, Weebly, and Wordpress. Each of them have a ton of free themes that you can build a nice looking site out of for free. If you don't want to shell out for your own domain name (10$ a year or so), you probably can get your current university to host it. I don't really know how to ask about that, but perhaps Takeruk would know. 

 

Here is mine, in case anyone is interested. 

[TakeruK]

A friend designed mine for me, but I would recommend Google Sites, Weebly, and Wordpress. Each of them have a ton of free themes that you can build a nice looking site out of for free. If you don't want to shell out for your own domain name (10$ a year or so), you probably can get your current university to host it. I don't really know how to ask about that, but perhaps Takeruk would know. 

 

Here is mine, in case anyone is interested. 

 

That's a nice website!  

 

At my department, we all have computer accounts on the department servers, which runs Linux. We each have our own special folders/directories on the server and everything we put in that folder is accessible online through the server's address and your username (e.g. www.dept.school.edu/~name). 

 

So, in order to get this to work, I just had to email the IT people in my department and they set up that special directory for me (and also a shortcut for me to access it from my own computers easily). Now, when I create my website, whether it's coding the files myself, using Wix/Weebly/etc, or using Dreamweaver, or getting a friend to design it, the website itself is just a collection of files. I copy the files into this directory, change permissions so that it's publicly viewable and it's updated!

 

If you ever notice your professors or classes have course websites that look like www.dept.school.edu/~somename, then it should probably be fairly simple for your department to set up a website for you too! Again, I don't know if it's just because my field is so computer-dependent, or if it's true at all types of departments, but there are always several people working in IT for each department that can help you with this, no matter how much or little computer experience/knowledge you have!

[PhD applicant]

That's a nice website!

 

At my department, we all have computer accounts on the department servers, which runs Linux. We each have our own special folders/directories on the server and everything we put in that folder is accessible online through the server's address and your username (e.g. www.dept.school.edu/~name). 

 

So, in order to get this to work, I just had to email the IT people in my department and they set up that special directory for me (and also a shortcut for me to access it from my own computers easily). Now, when I create my website, whether it's coding the files myself, using Wix/Weebly/etc, or using Dreamweaver, or getting a friend to design it, the website itself is just a collection of files. I copy the files into this directory, change permissions so that it's publicly viewable and it's updated!

 

If you ever notice your professors or classes have course websites that look like www.dept.school.edu/~somename, then it should probably be fairly simple for your department to set up a website for you too! Again, I don't know if it's just because my field is so computer-dependent, or if it's true at all types of departments, but there are always several people working in IT for each department that can help you with this, no matter how much or little computer experience/knowledge you have!

I don't think it's just computer-related fields, at my school anyways. My guess about this is because the agreement our school has set up with Google says in our user agreement that we may change our Google site URL to our host school/~username, as you say, but it will remain serviced within Google. These terms are set up for both students and faculty, so it would apply to students who wish to self-advertise also. But this isn't something they advertise, I only noticed it because I read absolutely everything when I'm clicking 'agree' to terms of service, even if those terms are mandatory for attending school. Turns out, our school has purchased quite a lot of cool app usage for students. But I do know that our computer science department has even more stuff for the students in that department to play with; however, I believe their labs are open to regular students to utilize the platforms/programs as well. It amazes me how many resources are available on my campus that no one ever gets told about.

[philstudent1991]

A friend designed mine for me, but I would recommend Google Sites, Weebly, and Wordpress. Each of them have a ton of free themes that you can build a nice looking site out of for free. If you don't want to shell out for your own domain name (10$ a year or so), you probably can get your current university to host it. I don't really know how to ask about that, but perhaps Takeruk would know. 

 

Here is mine, in case anyone is interested. 

Awesome site Matt!