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I am about to start a PhD this fall. As such, I am contemplating about creating a personal website to host various academic activities and projects. In addition to sharing my academic interests, I think it would be a great opportunity to share my excitement and passion for mathematics with a wider audience, while providing valuable information, such as a CV, contact information, etc.

Is it a good idea to create a website this early in my career? If so, how would you recommend building my website? Using HTML, WordPress, Google sites, etc.

In most cases, I see professional mathematicians use raw HTML pages, and very few of them maintain a visually pleasing website, at least in my opinion.

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Instead of starting with some website you may use i.e. Github. Then create a separate repositories for things you already mentioned (CV, contact info etc.) and private repo(s) to brainstorm your ideas, document what you are doing etc. Private but shared with others repositories are great for collaboration

Markdown is often good enough for anything from wiki docs, presentations, CVs. As you are in the math I guess Latex is also an option.

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Yes, it might be good to do that. However, there are two caveats (at least)

First, keep it professional. Web pages can have a long life and things can come back to haunt you.

Second, don't get so tied up in web construction and all it might entail that it detracts from the important work of getting a degree. It can become an obsession.

Something fairly simple in structure that resembles an extended CV is a place to start.

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  • First and second are antagonistic goals. I concentrated on First. The website was not very pleasing, but informative and easy to maintain/automate.
    – Captain Emacs
    Commented Jun 7 at 0:32
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If you want to be in academia, a decent personal website is a must. In almost any interaction you have (applying for an internship, people interested in your work, potential collaborations etc), your website will be the first thing people would look for.

It can be simple and clean, GitHub pages is a perfectly acceptable option, or creating your own simple website is also fine. Keep it professional and tasteful!

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I think it's a great idea, and I would say especially as early as prior to starting a Ph.D.! Since you mention talking about mathematics to a wider audience -- I think there's a side benefit to maintaining your own site and writing about your academic interests. If you write something regularly, like a short blog post or a short note on something you've been studying, you train yourself to become a better academic writer. This will become extremely useful to you in your Ph.D. It will help you in writing your future publications and a dissertation. The ability to write well academically is very valued by advisors because it saves them a lot of time in making corrections to your writing.

Like others who posted an answer, I also recommend hosting your page on GitHub since it's free and gives you a lot of leeway on what you can achieve. You can use Jekyll to convert markdown to HTML, it's super handy.

I also created my personal site shortly before starting my Ph.D. to showcase some of the past academic work, my scientific interests, and my fun side-projects. It has grown with content over the Ph.D. years, for example I've been adding links to my publications, links to the talks I gave, and I always keep a link to the most recent CV. This has helped many researchers over the years to find me and my work. It helps in science outreach and disseminating your research.

Best wishes for your Ph.D. journey!

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