An academic personal website you keep when you change institution
Your department profile disappears when you move, and it rarely shows your work the way you'd choose. An academic personal website on your own domain keeps publications, teaching, a CV and a contact route in one place that follows you from PhD to post-doc to chair.
Why not just use the university page
Institutional profiles are worth keeping current, but they have three problems. They vanish or redirect when your contract ends, often just as you're on the job market. Their templates are fixed, so your research summary sits under a stock photo of the campus. And editing them usually means emailing someone in communications. A personal site with your name as the domain is the stable link you can put on every paper, poster and slide for the rest of your career.
What an academic site needs
- Name, position and affiliation, with your research area in one plain-language line a journalist could use.
- Research: two or three short paragraphs on your questions and why they matter, with links to the main papers.
- Publications: the full list, newest first, with DOIs and links to open-access versions.
- Teaching: courses taught, levels, and any materials you share publicly.
- CV: as a page of text, plus a link to a PDF hosted where you keep it.
- Contact: institutional email, office if you choose, and a form for everything else.
- Identifiers: ORCID, Google Scholar and other profile links, so citations can be tied to you.
For a PhD student on the job market, add a job-market paper section near the top with an abstract and the paper link, and a short list of references with their permission.
Publications in a collection
The publication list is the part that most needs to stay current and is the most tedious to edit as one long page. On Anticode, keep it in a CMS collection with typed fields: title, authors, venue, year, type (journal, conference, chapter, preprint), DOI and an open-access link. Add an entry from the dashboard when a paper is accepted, and the list updates without rebuilding the site. Each entry can also have its own page at /publications/<slug>, which is useful for a paper with a dataset, slides and a plain-language summary.
Format author lists consistently, bold your own name, and mark preprints clearly. If a paper is under review, say so rather than listing a target journal.
Fast, readable and accessible
Academic sites are read on old office machines, conference wifi and screen readers. Pages from Anticode's design engine are plain HTML and CSS with no scripts, so they load quickly and hold up for years. Before anything is published, Anticode's design gate checks basics such as a declared page language, a phone viewport, visible keyboard focus, reduced-motion support and alt text on every image. Those don't make a site fully accessible on their own, but they catch the common failures in university templates.
A calm design system suits the material: Editorial (Geist) or Swiss (Inter Tight) for most fields, Organic (Figtree) if you'd like something warmer. One font family and one accent colour keep long publication lists readable.
Building and owning it
Describe it: "an academic website for a post-doc in marine ecology, with research summary, publications, teaching, CV and contact". The Architect plans the pages and may ask about tone. Publish to an anticode.dev address, then connect your own domain on a paid plan; the certificate is issued automatically. You can also export the site as one self-contained HTML file or a Next.js project if your institution prefers to host it. The research lab guide covers sites for a whole group.
What it doesn't handle
- No BibTeX or Scholar import. Publications are entered in the dashboard.
- No maths rendering. Published pages run no scripts, so LaTeX-style equations won't typeset; use images with alt text or plain notation.
- No document hosting for PDFs of papers or the CV; link to a repository or institutional archive.
- English pages only. The builder and generated pages are in English.
Questions people ask
Should a PhD student have a personal website?
By the time you're presenting or applying for posts, yes: it's where hiring committees go after reading your name on a paper.
Can I use my university email on the contact page?
Yes, as a mailto link. The contact form is useful for enquiries you'd rather keep in one place, and each submission is saved in your dashboard.
What happens to the site if I move institution?
Nothing: it's on your own domain and account. Update your affiliation and carry on.