How to Build a Personal Website
Published:
This page provides some resource and my own experience for building a personal website.
Everyone has different requirements on building a website. The factors include the theme, webpage layout, ad free, user friendliness, widgets, etc. On my first attempt, I used WordPress to build my personal website. It worked really well until one day I noticed there is advertisement at the bottom of each page. If you would like ad free, you have to pay a small amount of fee monthly to upgrade (https://wordpress.com/pricing/). Therefore, I decided to switch to another platform which will allow me to enjoy all the benefits, in particular ad free, without paying. After a survey of the platforms, I finally chose github pages.
Platforms
There are different (and many) hosts available for your to build a personal website for free. Some popular ones are listed as below.
- WordPress
- Weebly
- Google Sites
- Github Pages
Github Pages
Some popular themes for github pages:
- minimal-mistakes: https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/quick-start-guide/
- https://academicpages.github.io/
An experience of using github pages can be found at https://jponttuset.cat/building-an-academic-website/.
In our opinion, WordPress versus github pages is comparable to Word versus LaTex. If you are fimilar with LaTex, you will not find difficulty using github pages. It uses markdown to render the format. While the syntax of markdown is different from LaTex, the methodology is the same.
Tutorials
Markdown
Markdown is used to render the github pages.
A quick introduction on its syntax can be found here