Hey guys, I need some advice on creating a website to advertise myself.
I'm a student in college right now, and want to set myself up a personal site to advertise myself and my abilities, and have a little blog on the side for my projects and stuff. Right now, a lot of my income comes from home electronic repair and setup around my town. (Computers, TVs, sound systems, etc.) I have really limited HTML and CSS experience, and I've never had a real website before.
I just want something people or potential employers can look at and get a good representation of me. I'm hoping for something relatively cheap and easy to set up. I'd like a service that would give me an email on my domain as well. Does anyone have any suggestions/advice for a first time website? Thanks in advance!
Honestly, considering the prerequisites, I think squarespace isnt a bad idea. I've done a bit of craigslist contract work for web design and I would usually just end up hooking a customer up with a squarespace site because of how easy it is for them to understand / control themselves.
Squarespace includes super easy to use blogging features. There is a fully featured ios/android app to write and publish from.
The price of squarespace per year is comparable to buying a domain and server space per year. Set up is literally drag and drop so its got you there.
They support custom email addresses as long as you use your own domain. (Ps. Im pretty sure they include a custom .com domain in the site if you pay for the first year up front)
I know this sounds identical to a WAN show sponsor spot or somthing...but honestly, its a good option for your use case. best of luck!
What you need to account for is that a website requires a domain and hosting services. If you can manage the hosting yourself, you should buy a domain and invest a few hours in customizing some free templates to your liking. As in the end it will be cheaper.
The DIY services will provide a domain name and hosting along a wide variety of templates and an intuitive interface to customize your website. If the price is ok for you, you will have your online resume up and running in no time.
I would agree with the others that recommend either using a full site template, or a service that provides the template and then plug in your data. Then you can learn HTML/CSS if you wish, at your pace and replace the templated site if/when you choose.
But whatever route you take, think very hard before posting any personal opinions on a blog attached to your domain, (especially about politics), even if you think your posts are seemingly tame and mundane, if you plan to use your site for employment prospects. These days, anything and everything you post will inevitably be heavily scrutinized when it comes to employment opportunities and could come back to haunt you.
This might seem a little advanced but I suggest making two servers with Digital Ocean. One on the 1GB plan ($10/month) and one on the 512MB plan (5$/month). Use the 1GB server as a Mail In A Box server that is very easy to set up and manage as an email and DNS server. Use the smaller server as your web and database server and scale it up as you need to. There are good tutorials on their site and I'll make one on mine and link it to you, making it very easy to get started with the right options. Wordpress is very easy to use for a blogging site or just a personal site. Just check the control panel for updates daily. The nice thing about Wordpress is you can enable multi site so you can have multiple Wordpress sites using sub domains from a single installation. You could even let people make their own sites as a way of driving traffic to your domain.
I need to address the second part of their post. Offline you have many different personas that you show different groups of people so you can have approval from all of them. You might do this online by having different identities or a single identity that isn't connected to you. When you use your real name, you need to be very careful. Even something as neutral as quoting the Bible could be profiled as homophobic and sexist. If you interact with people online, don't make your real name known anywhere. I have my site set up so I can tell people about it and do offline collaboration so I respect what topics I post. If you have your name on your site then don't interact with people under and handle that is connected to it. You don't know what things people will take too seriously.