What it feels like to create your personal website with 0 web-design experience

This isn’t a tutorial on how to use the tools required to create this website, plenty of those are already available (see links below). This is a quick overview of my experience building this website, so more appropriate for people who are hesitant about making their own personal website and want to know what it’s actually like to dive in this with 0 web-design knowledge - hopefully this will convince you to go ahead!

I remember one of my supervisor’s first questions when I started my PhD was: “Do you have a personal website?”. The answer then was, of course, “No”, and the thought in the back of my mind was “Why would I ever need this??”.

Yet a year or so later, here I am, so what changed? Three things I guess:

• I heard SO many people say that all academics should have personal websites (literally, Twitter is filled with posts on this). Surely, if this is such a popular opinion, I should investigate!

• What I considered to be “my” personal website (i.e. my university profile page) did not really feel “personal”. I don’t have any control over the layout, and it’s not really a place where I can talk at length about my work/interests/random topics

• I was looking for an excuse to code to procrastinate constructively (this is the concept of “I’m kind of working even though I’m not really working” - for good conscience)

My first step was to look at other websites from LSHTM colleagues. I immediately felt partly motivated by how awesome they were, but also partly lost since I had no clue how I could create something even remotely close in terms of quality. The next steps were trial and error really, some degree of confusion along the way is almost inevitable. I first stumbled upon GitHub Pages, which essentially allows you to turn a GitHub repository into a website. I played around with it a bit, but unfortunately it meant starting from scratch as I couldn’t find a satsifying template. A few more Google searches later, I ended up on the Academic Theme website. It’s the same idea as GitHub Pages (i.e. your website is a GitHub repository, here’s the one for my site), but relies on a web-design framework called “Hugo”, and matched what I was looking for:

• It provided me with a detailed template to start with

• Allows a great degree of customisation (as can be seen in the examples)

• Works with blogdown, an R package that converts R Markdown files into HTML

This last point was crucial - I had no previous knowledge of HTML, but R is what I work with, so I was in a familiar environment during the creation process, which made it more enjoyable.

I’m not going to write a tutorial on how to use the Academic Theme or blogdown, excellent ones already exist such as Up & running with blogdown and Tips for using the Hugo academic theme. Also, the point here is not to say that what I used is the best option! As I said above, I had a few criteria, and the Academic Theme just ticked all the boxes for me. Figure out what your own criteria are, scope out the options available, and you’ll find something that suits you!

Regardless of the choice you make, there will likely be a learning curve, more or less steep depending on your existing knowledge. Again, this is something to consider; do you want something straightforward, or something you can personalise in-depth? Figure this out now, this will save you from wasting time learning a tool that’s too complex for what you want, or inversely too limited, forcing you to start again from scratch when you realise that you’ll never be able to implement that one feature you desperately want.

Honestly, I have no idea how this site is going to end up. At the moment, I plan to keep it up to date because it’s fun, and use it as an excuse to write more. But it’s also possible that it’ll just end up gathering dust! Maybe that’s what you’re thinking too: “Should I spend time and effort building something I’m not even sure I’m going to use in the long term?”. Look at it this way: it’s an excellent opportunity to learn more about coding, and think about how to present yourself and your research, which are both useful skills to develop!

Best case scenario: you create an amazing website that you can use to support your research. Worse case scenario: you procrastinate constructively, and improve your coding & communication skills. In any case, to answer my question in the title: yes, it’s worth it!