Tips of building a personal website

As a software engineer, you may wish to have a personal website to showcase your experience and portfolio. This article will share my insights into building a personal website, hoping to help you get started quickly.
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Personal Website

When job hunting, some companies may request a personal website from you. Therefore, you might want to create a personal website to showcase your experience and portfolio. For career changers and recent graduates, building a personal website is also a great way to showcase your skills and potential, and to stand out among other job seekers.

This article will share my experience as a software engineer in building a personal website, hoping to help you get started quickly.

Basic Understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript

There are many tools available for building personal websites, such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and more. These tools allow users to quickly build a website using various templates and drag-and-drop features without the need for coding.

If you only need a simple website, these tools may be sufficient. However, if you want more flexibility in the website-building process, you still need a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the foundation of web development. HTML defines the structure of web pages, CSS designs the style of web pages, and JavaScript implements interactive features. If you're unfamiliar with these technologies, you can refer to this MDN tutorial on web development, which is an excellent learning resource. Once you have mastered these basics, you can start building your personal website through programming.

Choose a Template on GitHub

Building a website from scratch could be a time-consuming task. Therefore, I suggest you start by finding a template you like and then modify it accordingly. There are many enthusiastic developers on GitHub who share their website templates. For example, you can find many free website templates on GitHub #personal-website, and choose one that suits your needs and preferences.

Here are some good personal website templates I found on GitHub:

For some popular templates, you can further explore how developers in the community fork these templates and modify them according to their needs. This process not only allows you to customize your website more comprehensively but also enables you to learn some web development techniques by reading other developers' code.

Once you've found a suitable template, you can fork it to your own GitHub account and then make modifications. You can customize the content, style, and layout of the template according to your needs to create a personal website that matches your style.

To give credits to the original author, I always indicate the source of the template on the website and mention the author's name and link in the README file when using a template.

Deploy Your Website Using GitHub Pages

After you've made modifications to your website, you can deploy it to GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is a static website hosting service where you can deploy your personal website and access it through https://username.github.io. For example, if your GitHub username is john, as long as your repository name is john.github.io, your code can be deployed to https://john.github.io.

This method is very convenient and completely free. For more information on using GitHub Pages, you can refer to the GitHub Pages official documentation.