Academic Website

You’ve got to make your materials easily accessible, and a website is the easiest way to do that. This is a necessity for job market candidates at this point.

Basic pointers

• Simple, easy-to-navigate design
• Professional with personal flair

Basic pointers

• Simple, easy-to-navigate design
• Professional with personal flair
• Keep documents accessible
  • GitHub
  • Built-in server space (SquareSpace, etc.)
  • Not Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Getting started

Lots of options to get a decent website up and running

• Google Sites
• SquareSpace
• Quarto websites (my recommendation)
• Hugo with selected theme

What is Quarto?

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system.

• Takes your content (text, markdown, code) and template info as input
• Creates final static website
• Same tool you may already use for papers and presentations

Using Quarto for websites

• Write content in .qmd files (same as your papers/slides)
• quarto render builds the site
• Host on GitHub Pages for free
• Very easy to get started with minimal configuration

Using GitHub Pages

• It’s free!
• Push your rendered site to a docs/ folder or gh-pages branch
• GitHub deploys automatically
• Allows custom domain names

Other options

• Hugo is still a solid choice (but steeper learning curve)
• SquareSpace and Google Sites work if you want zero coding
• WordPress is fine too

Managing content

• No web developer, html, or css expertise required for Quarto
• Can include Jupyter Notebooks and R code
• Easy to keep papers, CV, and teaching materials all in one place