Build a personal research homepage with free or open-source tools to present your bio, research areas, publications, project descriptions and tool downloads. Suits researchers, PhD students, research group members and freelance research consultants who want a long-term, maintainable personal site.
First decide what the site will show, such as your bio, research areas, publications, research tools, project case studies and contact details.
A personal research site doesn't need to be complex at first; make the home page, bio, publications and contact details clear.
Choose a static site tool that fits how you like to maintain things: Hugo or Zola for a personal homepage, MkDocs or Docusaurus for project documentation.
If you don't want to maintain a back-end database, a static site is the safest choice.
Organise your bio, research areas, publications and project descriptions into structured content files for easy maintenance.
Split publications, software and workflows into separate data files instead of hard-coding everything into pages.
Upload the site code to a code hosting platform and deploy it to a free static hosting service.
Preview locally before deploying to check links, images and mobile layout.
Regularly update publications, projects and tool descriptions, saving every change with version control.
A personal website's value comes from long-term maintenance, not a one-off build.
