My personal academic website is up!
I have always wanted to build my personal websites and occasionally explored website builders like Wix and SquareSpace. Although those builders seem really easy to use and provide eye-catching themes, my feeling is that they still require a lot of nifty photographs and being handled by a user with actual graphic design or visual art skills to look right. When it comes to the academic site, my goal is to keep the design clean without too much distractions but still looking pretty. There are basic requirements in my mind:
- I really don’t plan to or have the time to learn website development, so it needs to be a solution for beginners.
- Minimal cost (i mean zero) for website hosting while long-lasting.
- Simple and easy to maitain layout: research, publications, and CV
Knowing about the free hosting service by Github Pages is pretty much what get me started with some real work. At first, It is super easy to make a project webpage on Github websites with some button clicking, which can automatically a repo README into a static page. Awesome!
Then what about a personal page? On a plain index.html, I can paste my whole CV following “Helllo World”, but I think I want something prettier and more organized than that. After watching serveral youtube tutoral videos and playing with several templates, I decided to settle down with this Beautiful Jekyll theme. I must say I am very happy about the results!