It presents you & your research to the world, making you more visible. It’s especially useful for applying to jobs. I know in my field (computer science), it’s basically assumed that all grad students should have a website. From Googling/searching Twitter, I think it’s valued in other STEM fields, too!
This document has some ideas about what should go on a website (and other tips on having an online presence as a grad student). TLDR, you need your name, educational background and current program, advisor’s name, your projects, and your publications.
To make a website you need two things: the content, and the hosting.
Possible hosting sites include GitHub pages, Google Sites, Wix, Wordpress, and Weebly. You can also build your website with any of these tools and then host it on a custom domain (e.g., yourname.com), but that is not free. GitHub pages requires some coding, while the other sites are all no-code.
I’m including instructions for Google Sites because the UI was most intuitive to me, and for GitHub pages because that’s what I use.
Go to Google Sites. I recommend using your personal account, not your UW account so that you maintain access even after graduating.
More instructions are available at this website I made.
These are very simplified instructions, intended to minimize the amount of coding that’s required. If you already use Git, and/or want to learn it, I recommend following these instructions. Then, you can skip to Step 5.
This is a simplified workflow and not how people normally use GitHub. It’s fine for these purposes, just be aware of that in case you ever need to use git in the future
See https://spookypancakes.github.io for an example website and some more tips.
Create a GitHub account. Choose your username carefully: your website URL will be username.github.io.
Create a public GitHub repository called username.github.io
Download this file, and unzip it.
Create a new directory on your computer called username.github.io and move all of the files you just downloaded into this directory.
Edit the files!
_config.yml Edit lines 16, 17, 18 (optional), 22, and 23. If you don’t have twitter, you can replace the username on line 22 with “”.index.md Add any information you want on the homepage.cv.md If you want to include a link to a PDF version of your CV,
cv.md to have the correct URL (update both your username and the PDF name)cvplaceholder.pdf - you don’t need it anymore.cvplaceholder.pdf and cv.md.teaching.md I included this as a placeholder for teaching or anything else you want a page for. You’ll need to updates the content (line 7-end), and also the header (lines 3 and 4) if you want the page to have a different title. If you don’t want this page, you can just delete it. If you want additional subpages, copy the contents into a new file.