Student Websites

If you are a student who is doing stuff, then you should consider making a website. What counts as stuff? Anything! Perhaps you are taking reading courses and writing final papers, or giving talks at seminars, or doing interesting side hustles.

Your own personal website is helpful for a bunch of reasons.

It keeps a running record of the stuff that you’ve done.
It contributes to a diverse, vibrant, and personal internet.
It raises the stakes on your projects, by making them real.
It gives people a place to find your contact information.

I’m writing this post because I recently wanted to look up a former student. We met each other on campus by chance today and I wanted to send them an e-mail. They’ve since moved on to another institution and I didn’t know how to contact them. When I looked them up online, I find a seminar presentation they gave months ago. The seminar page does not include their contact information. And so, here we are.

What should definitely go on your page?

Your full name, pronouns, and preferred name.
Your contact information.
A high quality photo of yourself.

This last point about a personal photo is important. The photo is there to say: “This is a reasonable person.” It is meant to trigger someone’s visual memory of you. It does not have to be interesting, glamorous, or professionally shot. Just a high quality photo that is instantly recognizable as you.

A Few Examples #

Minimal Setup #

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to host a simple static HTML+CSS webpage on GitHub pages. You can see a minimal working example here: https://pgadey.github.io/.

What am I assuming? If you’re reading this page about student websites, then I assume that you’ve got access to an internet browser and want to set up a personal website. I’m not going to assume anything other than your ability to fill in forms on a webpage and edit text in your browser.

A website requires someone to host it. You need to be able to upload files to a server somewhere and direct people to them. In this note, I won’t get in to the details¹ of setting up your own server and domain name. Instead, we’ll use GitHub Pages².

So, let’s make a website! To do so, you’ll need to make a GitHub account. Let’s say that name of your account is $NAME and your name in the real world is $REALNAME. If you’ve got a GitHub account then you’ve almost got a website. The GitHub Pages Quickstart guide is pretty good but goes a bit too deep. Here is the short and sweet version.

Create a new repo named $NAME.github.io.
Set the description to something useful:
“The personal website of $REALNAME.”
Leave visibility as Public. This is the only option for pages of free GitHub accounts. This means the whole codebase of your website will be publicly visible.
Create the repo.
Start adding files. You can do this by manually copy-and-pasting in the contents from the listings below. You will want to edit the various files appropriately. For example, you probably want a non-doggo headshot.

You can also see the whole repo here.

Once you’ve completed the steps above, give GitHub a few minutes to sort out the hosting of your website. It took me about five minutes from creating the repo and index.html for it become publically visible.

Student Websites

A Few Examples #

Minimal Setup #

Recommended Reading #

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