The Benefit of Having a Website
Most academics have a website (apart from their institutional information page) that displays their curriculum vitae, research experience, teaching experience, ongoing projects, and more. This website often provides some of the first pieces of information about you that other academics will encounter online, so it is an important resource to showcase who you are as a scholar. If somebody meets you at a conference or reads some of your work, they may want to look you up to see what other research you’re working on or how to contact you. Having a website can also increase people’s awareness about you, your brand, and your work at a baseline level. After all, if you have no website, people can’t look you up in the first place!
This advice is especially important for graduate students who are preparing for the academic job market. My experience as a graduate student in the social sciences is that many social science academic job applications explicitly ask for applicants to include a link to their personal website. Potential employers will want to search you online to see if there is anything about you on your website that is not covered in your application materials or that may add more information to the materials you submitted. Your personal website can provide a deeper dive into your work as a scholar than what is possible on social media or even on LinkedIn, which tends to be utilized little for job hunting by social science academics. A nice, polished website is essential to your job application process.
When To Make a Website
A common question amongst graduate students is when you should make your academic website. If an academic website is meant to showcase your research, but you are a junior grad student who does not yet have any concrete research to put on a website, should you wait?
The answer to this question is not one size fits all, but generally speaking, you will want to make a website by the time you have completed qualifying exams, defended your prospectus, and are considered a PhD candidate. Even if you have not been involved in any teaching by then or have not yet had any research published (it is very common not to have any of these things at this time yet, by the way!), you are a “senior” graduate student at this phase. You will likely be going to conferences more often, deepening your professional network, and thinking about how to prepare for the academic job market at this time. It is helpful to have your own website at this point, and you will likely find that there are actually lots of things to include on your website by this stage of your career!
If you are interested in non-academic careers, a website can still be helpful to have. These websites can showcase the work you accomplished in graduate school, and you can frame your work around how it will benefit you in non-academic jobs.
Website Content
Your personal academic website is about you as a professional, so you want to keep the website just that: professional. This website is not a personal blog; it is meant to showcase you as a scholar. However, professional does not mean ugly or boring! You want your website to be aesthetically pleasing and representative of who you are. For example, on my website, I use photos I took during fieldwork as page headers. These photos spruce the website up a bit, and they also showcase what countries I study as a political scientist—and that I actually have fieldwork experience, which is an important part of my research!
Most commonly, academic websites include the following pages:
- A Home page that includes a brief “About Me” text (brief summary of your work and your degree backgrounds), contact info, and often a headshot.
- A Curriculum Vitae page that displays your most recent C.V. or links to a file of your C.V.
- A Research page that talks about your research interests and projects you are working on. If you have publications, you would list those on this page. You often also include a “Working Papers” section on this page. If something is listed as a working paper, you want to be able to produce a working draft of it if requested. If you do not have enough of a paper done yet to produce a working draft, it is better to list that particular project under another section, like “Works in Progress.” For me, working papers tend to be papers I have not yet sent out to any journal but have presented at conferences, so I have a full draft, but the project is not yet finished.
Some websites also include the following pages:
- A Teaching page that lists courses you have TA’ed for or courses you have taught as an independent instructor. Any additional teaching training or efforts you have been involved in can go here, too. Some people also include their syllabi.
- A Dissertation page if you want to showcase your dissertation specifically apart from your Research Page
- A Public Work page if you have any engagement with more public-facing work connected to your research but is not necessarily a classic “academic” output. Some examples of public work: you were interviewed about a topic by a news outlet, you wrote a think piece that was published in an online magazine, you have been involved in any government policy work, etc.
A great way to get a feel of what your website should look like is to look at the websites of more senior graduate students in your program/department. Most academic websites look very similar to one another, so it is absolutely acceptable to model your own website off of the websites of your peers.
Popular Platforms
When it comes to getting your website started, many options are available to you. In fact, it can be a bit overwhelming to know what website platforms are best to use! Talking to other graduate students in your program is one great way to get more information about which website platform to use. If your peers have recommendations from their own experiences, then following their advice can be a good way to take out the overwhelm of trying to pick a platform.
Another way to narrow down platforms is to decide whether or not to pay for the website. Paying for a website does not need to be expensive, and it is often hard to avoid if you want your own custom URL. Most people use their names as the URL for their academic website. For example, my website is emilytelia.com. Some people may use a variation of their own name for their URL that also highlights their area of focus, such as fullnamepoliticalscience.com, or highlights the fact that they have a PhD, such as fullnamephd.com. If you want a customizable URL, you most often have to pay, but free options do exist!
One common free option is to make a Google Site. You can make a Google Site if you have a Google account. The website builder is simple but sufficient for an academic website that, ultimately, has a basic set-up. Google Sites does offer you the option to buy a domain, but you don’t have to do so. The one downside of a free Google Site is that your domain is going to look like sites.google.com/view/WEBSITENAMEHERE. You won’t be able to have a custom domain such as YOURNAMEHERE.com unless you pay for it. Another common free option is Wix. Wix allows you to obtain a domain for free, and it includes multiple website-building features. However, similarly to Google Sites, your domain name will include “wixsites” in it.
If you are willing to pay for a domain, your platform options expand. It is not expensive to buy a domain, and it often gives your website a nice, professional polish, which can greatly enhance the site. Many website domain prices range between $15 and $30 a year. Some common options include domain.com, bluehost.com, godaddy.com, hostgator.com, and namecheap.com. You should pay attention to whether these platforms also include some kind of built-in web builder, like Weebly, which will allow you to build your website very easily once you have purchased your domain. Another add-on to consider is paying for a security certificate so that your website will always come up as “secure” on people’s browsers. Some domain sites even include a security certificate in their basic pricing!
No matter what platform you choose, the most important thing is to keep your website updated. It is especially important to keep an up-to-date C.V. on your website. You want your website to display the latest information about all the cool research you are doing, so don’t forget to update it when you get some good news!
About the author:
Emily Elia is a recent Ph.D. graduate in Political Science. She graduated from The University of Alabama in 2018, where she double-majored in political science and Spanish.
Further Reading:
Getting Teaching Experience While in Grad School: Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence
Unleashing Productivity: Essential Technology and Tools for Grad Students
From Scholar to Startup: Navigating Entrepreneurship as a Ph.D. Student at Rice University