Another key decision you will have to make is where to publish your site. Having a web presence entails placing materials online for employers to access. This can be done in a multitude of ways, as there are many services and locations to host your online site. First, you should make a distinction between companies that primarily provide hosting services, and companies that primarily provide web site building tools (many companies provide both).
Both of these types of services provide many of the same basic tools and capabilities. For most job seekers, we suggest using a website builder such as Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace to build your professional personal website.
The website builders we discuss below can all be used for FREE. The main expense when using a website builder is if you want to have a custom domain name (for instance, if you want your website to be located at www.igraduated.com rather than www.igraduated.wixsite.com). Free accounts do have some limitations, but you can always upgrade in the future to a paid account if you wish to take advantage of the paid features, which include things such as the following:
The important thing to remember is that, with a little research, you can find the service that meets your needs, and avoid paying more (or anything) if you're willing to sacrifice some control or functionality.
For your professional personal web site for this course, we suggest one of the following website building platforms:
All of these sites provide free site design tools and hosting services. They have similar abilities, but, as with any choice, it can be useful to look at online reviews to access the experiences of current users.
Here is a review of these three web site platforms.
As you review others' experiences with these sites, look at example pages to see if the products look like what you envision for your own site. The web is primarily a visual medium, so if the end product looks good, it might be worth dealing with a less intuitive design interface. You might even consider creating accounts and testing out the interface used to design a site, or watching videos of these tools in use. Some key questions you might want to ask as you review these services:
You might be the kind of person who likes to just jump in and start building, and that's fine too. You can learn as you go, and identify issues sometimes more easily by actually trying to use a service.
Our advice is to try Wix. It has good reviews and a large number of templates to choose from. One minor drawback is that it may not let you switch templates after you make your site live (but you can always create a new site and move the content if need be). And you can always edit and try different templates before making your site live on the web.
You might also check out the available tutorials for these platforms to get a sense of which one seems to fit your needs
Wix
Weebly
Squarespace