My Personal Web Page Journey

When I started to make a personal web page for myself, I wished there was a complete article about where to start and a complete story about someone who experienced and made mistakes to learn how to do it fast and with minimal hassle.

TLDR;

As a PhD student, I chose Academic Pages which is a fork of Minimal Mistakes.

How it started

I had previously have a personal page using Branded.me but it stopped working at some point and I wanted to try another method to have my own web page. After that, I used Wordpress to make a website for our research lab in my master studies. After using Wordpress, I dealt with buying a web hosting package and a domain based on my name. I used that hosting service to put some html pages to introduce myself and some links for contact, but after some years, the hosting plan finished and I somehow lost my web page again.

This time, when I was on vacation and had time to work on my personal website project, my journey started by searching and comparing hosting services with a rare requirement–having ssh access. In that process I got to know about Honstinger hosting service which had an affordable price about €4 per month. Just when I purchased a yearly plan and got my domain, I found out that it is possible to have a personal website hosted on Github Pages for free! Needless to say, I canceled my hosting plan.

End of jouney towards Jekyll and Academic Pages

I was reading this awesome book on Data Science–Build a Career in Data Science–and it suggested Jekyll for people who are familiar with Python. So I searched for Best Jekyll Themes for Personal Website, Free Jekyll Themes, Jekyll Theme for Academics and I got to know about al-folio theme. I started to make my own web pages using this theme but there were some issues with it. First the theme was not showing the best on Mobile as the pictures on the documents show. The font and link color was not my favorite which I managed to change it. I was learning the structure and how things work in the process of putting content and customizing it. I saw some good example websites made by al-folio theme such as otiliastr.github.io and alexhaydock.co.uk. But when I wanted to change the publications page and news section, it was not going well. So I decided to fork my repo from otiliastr.github.io and replace my contents. Then I realized that it does not build automatically and the website does not update whenever I change the contents. I actually tried to make it build automatically which did not work and in the end I gave up with the whole theme.

After that, I learned the structure of templates based on Jekyll and looked for other options. I found Academic Pages quite suitable with a nice reputation (well, many stars!). I started changing the theme based on that and it was going smoothly. I found another good example–jayrobwilliams.com–based on this theme. He has a blog post on Building an Academic Website. One of the good points about this theme is that it is based on Minimal Mistakes and this theme is well documented.

In the end, I am gradually putting my content on my personal web page here and I am happy about it :)

Afterglow matters

After I put my initial contents on the website, there were still some concerns to consider. First, I wanted to have some insights on how my website is being visited. I used Google Analytics for that matter. Another issue was with finding my web page and its contents by Google. I could not see my website in the results even with searching its domain or a part of a blog post. Then, I found 10 Ways to Get Google to Index Your Site helpful to resolve this.