Building a Personal Website

A personal website is the single best place to collect your projects, papers, code, and CV in one link you control. For students, it is a low-cost portfolio that makes you findable and signals that you take your work seriously.

Why Bother?

Portfolio: show real analyses, notebooks, and visualizations, not just a list of skills.
Projects and papers: host or link your research, blog posts, and course work.
Ownership: a personal domain is a stable home you keep across jobs and institutions.

Options for Building One

You do not need to hand-write HTML. These tools turn Markdown/R Markdown into a polished static site:

Quarto websites the current, language-agnostic standard (works with R, Python, Julia).
blogdown an R package that builds Hugo-powered blogs from R Markdown.
distill an R package aimed at scientific and technical writing.

All of them produce static HTML (plain files, no server logic) that you can host for free.

Where to Host

GitHub Pages free hosting straight from a GitHub repo.
Netlify free hosting with automatic rebuilds when you push to Git.

The Basic Steps

Create the site scaffold a project with your tool of choice.
Build to static HTML render the source into a folder of HTML/CSS/JS.
Push to a repo commit the project (and often the built output) to GitHub.
Enable Pages or connect Netlify point the host at your repo and it goes live.

Minimal Quarto Website

Create and preview a site from the terminal:

quarto create-project mysite --type website
cd mysite
quarto preview          # live local preview at http://localhost:port
quarto render           # build static HTML into the _site/ folder

The project is configured by a single _quarto.yml file:

project:
  type: website
  output-dir: docs        # GitHub Pages can serve from the docs/ folder

website:
  title: "Jane Researcher"
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: index.qmd
        text: Home
      - href: projects.qmd
        text: Projects
      - href: cv.qmd
        text: CV

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    toc: true

Setting output-dir: docs lets you push the built site and tell GitHub Pages to serve from the docs/ folder of your main branch, no extra tooling required.

Deploying to GitHub Pages

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial website"
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/username.github.io.git
git push -u origin main

Then, in the repository’s Settings → Pages, choose the branch and folder (e.g., main / docs) to publish. Your site appears at https://username.github.io.

Buying and Pointing a Domain

A custom domain (like janeresearcher.com) looks professional and is yours to keep.

Buy the domain from a registrar (Namecheap, Cloudflare, Google Domains, etc.).
Point it at your host using DNS records at the registrar:
- Add a CNAME record so www points to your host (e.g., username.github.io for GitHub Pages, or your Netlify subdomain).
- For the bare/apex domain, add the A records (GitHub Pages) or ALIAS/ANAME record (Netlify) the host documents.
Tell your host about the domain on GitHub Pages, set the custom domain in Settings → Pages (this writes a CNAME file into your repo); on Netlify, add it under Domain settings.
Enable HTTPS both hosts issue a free certificate once DNS resolves.

Do let DNS propagate (it can take minutes to a day) before assuming something is broken. Don’t forget to renew the domain, letting it lapse takes your site offline.