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Making a Personal Website

You can make a website and put it online for for free in less than 2 hours

You probably fall into two categories: A) You know at least basic web dev, B) You do not know web dev.

If you are in category A, building a personal website will likely take you less than 2 hours. If you are in category B, this is a great way to get started learning basic web development!

Why Make a Website? (It is Free)

Making a personal website is likely not going to be what gets you a job. However, you never know what might come out of it!

  • Some job applications might have a 'website' field and actually having one will make you stand out
  • If you link your website on your resume and have a portfolio section, you never know what jobs might actually look at it! (A big reason why I got a Google internship offer was because of my website)
  • You will learn something by deploying something to the Internet

How?

You need a GitHub account, know basic HTML, and be familiar with how to use Git. If you do not know any of this, take 3 hours of your life and try to learn these skills because they will be extremely useful. Watch this 15 minute video to get started.

Spend another 4 minutes looking at this post on how to make your website look decent.

  1. Make a GitHub repository named username.github.io where username is your GitHub user name.
  2. Make sure it is public
  3. Create an index.html file in this folder.
<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>REPLACE_ME</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="container">
      <div class="blurb">
        <h1>Hi there, I'm REPLACE_ME!</h1>
        <p>Who am I?</p>
      </div>
    </div>
    <footer>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="mailto:REPLACE_ME@gmail.com">REPLACE_ME</a></li>
        <li>
          <a href="https://github.com/REPLACE_ME">github.com/REPLACE_ME</a>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>

Here is something to get you started. Be sure to replace REPLACE_ME with the actual content. You can add links to your LinkedIn, your GitHub, your Resume, and whatever else you see fit!

  1. Commit and publish to GitHub! You should be able to see it on your GitHub repo and if you go to https://YOUR_USERNAME.github.io/ you should see your web page.

How to get free a custom domain?

You can actually get a custom domain for free through Namecheap! University students can get a .me domain for free here: https://nc.me/

This will only last for a year so keep that in mind!

Then you can link your Github repo to your free domain by visiting here!

How can I get a university website?

You can get a subdirectory to host a website like http://sites.pitt.edu/~you/ through the university for free.

The technology department has created a detailed guide here

.

Examples

Be creative!