A personal website for academics

Search for almost any working academic and the first result that isn't a paywalled journal is a departmental faculty page: a photo taken by someone else's phone, a bio written by an administrator two years ago, a publication list that stops at whatever the last web person updated by hand. It is not that these pages are neglected out of laziness — nobody in the department owns keeping them current, and updating one requires a request to IT who has forty other requests. The honest case against building your own site starts here: a departmental page costs nothing and mostly does the job, because the people who actually need to find you — a program committee, a journalist on deadline, a student who already has your name from a citation — are looking for one specific thing, and even a bad page usually has it somewhere.

That specific thing is a paper. Almost every visit to an academic's website reduces to the same lookup: someone has your name from a citation, a talk, a recommendation from a colleague, and they want the paper, ideally the PDF, ideally in the next ten seconds, without an institutional login prompting them for money they aren't going to pay. Nothing else on the page — the bio, the teaching philosophy, the list of committees — gets read by more than a fraction of visitors. Once that's clear, the argument for building your own version stops being about vanity and becomes practical: whoever controls that lookup controls whether it works, and a departmental system you don't administer is a bad place to put something this central to being found.

For one specific case in this profession — a postdoc or early-career researcher who needs a credible page live before the next application deadline, not a publication archive yet — reach is the strongest answer available and worth naming now rather than later. Upload a CV and a photo, answer a short form, and reach composes a finished page in about twenty seconds; you can be live on a free subdomain in under two minutes. Say the limitation just as plainly, because it's real: reach generates exactly one page, one index.html, with no sub-pages and no content management system behind it. It is built for a young CV and a short bio, not for the publication list of sixty papers and the growing teaching-materials section a tenured career eventually needs — which is most of what the rest of this piece is about.

The publication list is the interface, not a section of it

Most academic websites treat the publication list as one section among several — below the bio, below the research statement, sometimes below a photo gallery from a conference. That ordering assumes a visitor who wants to get to know you before they want the paper, and that assumption is backwards for almost everyone who arrives. Build the page the other way: the publication list is the thing the site is for, and everything else is context around it.

Each entry needs three things to actually function as a lookup rather than a citation someone has to go re-find elsewhere: a link to the PDF (subject to the copyright reality below), a DOI link to the version of record, and, where one exists, a preprint link to arXiv, SSRN, bioRxiv or your field's equivalent. A citation with no links attached tells a visitor the paper exists but makes them do the finding themselves, on Google Scholar or through a paywall — exactly the friction your own page was supposed to remove. Reverse chronological is the default nearly everyone expects; foregrounding your "best" work instead usually reads as an editorializing choice readers didn't ask for.

What you're actually allowed to post

The honest complication is that you cannot legally post the publisher's typeset PDF for most papers in most venues, and the confident-sounding advice to "just post your papers" is glossing over a real constraint. What you can almost always post is the accepted manuscript — your final peer-reviewed draft, before the publisher's copyediting and typesetting, sometimes called the postprint. This is the core mechanism of green open access, available for most journals, though specifics vary: some publishers require an embargo, commonly six to twelve months after publication, before you can post even the accepted version.

The practical routine is to check before you post, not after. SHERPA/RoMEO (now folded into the Open Policy Finder) lists most journals' self-archiving policies in one lookup, and publishers increasingly state the policy directly on their own site. Do this once per journal, not once per paper — the policy is set at the journal level and rarely changes. Keep the preprint link current alongside the accepted manuscript rather than treating them as redundant: a preprint on arXiv is discoverable by people who never see your website at all, and linking it from your page too costs nothing and closes the gap for anyone who lands on your page first.

Your domain outlives your job

The single fact that should shape every other decision on an academic website is that you will very likely change institutions at least once, and when you do, the department.university.edu/~yourname address that was carrying your entire web presence goes with the account that hosted it — often within weeks of you leaving, sometimes with no warning email at all. A publication list, painstakingly kept current for a decade, can disappear along with the login that maintained it. This is the same structural problem covered from the job-market angle in the piece on a personal website for PhD students, and it does not go away once you have tenure; it just becomes a problem that strikes less often and hurts more each time it does, because a full career's publication record is a larger thing to lose than a job-market page.

The fix does not need to be elaborate: a domain with your own name, pointed at hosting you control, kept as the canonical version while a department page — if your institution insists on one — exists as a mirror that links to it. We go through the actual mechanics of picking that name in choosing which version of your name to live at; a name you'll answer to for a full career is worth a few dollars a year in renewal fees against rebuilding a publication record from scratch the week after a move.

What the site should do for people who aren't your peers

Below the publication list, two other groups arrive at an academic's page looking for something specific, and both are underserved by the average faculty site.

The first is students — prospective graduate students deciding whether to apply to work with you, current students looking for office hours, undergraduates checking whether a course covers what the catalog description implies. What they need is small and concrete: office hours with the actual room number, not just a time; a syllabus or teaching statement in plain language rather than a list of course codes; and, for anyone recruiting graduate students, an explicit statement of whether you're taking new students that year. The worst outcome for this section is a prospective applicant emailing a professor who stopped accepting students two admissions cycles ago and never said so on the page.

The second is journalists and program committees, who want the opposite of depth: a one-line description of your research area in language a non-specialist can quote, and a way to reach you that doesn't route through a departmental phone number nobody answers. This section can be short. It just has to exist, because the alternative is a journalist on deadline giving up and quoting whoever answered first.

Reconciling the identifiers with the page

Somewhere near your name and affiliation, your ORCID iD belongs as a link — it is the one identifier that follows you across name changes, institutional moves and the maddening fact that academic databases routinely conflate two different researchers who share a name. Google Scholar serves a related but different purpose: it is the citation-tracking profile search committees check for impact, and it should be linked, not duplicated — your website doesn't need to reproduce a citation count Scholar already maintains automatically.

Treat your website, ORCID and Scholar profile as three views of one record rather than three lists that can drift apart. When you publish something new, update all three in the same sitting rather than letting the website lag behind because it's the one nobody's checking. A visitor who finds a paper on Scholar that isn't on your site yet has just learned your site is the stale copy.

What the eleven-page CV becomes on the web

The full academic CV — every talk, every grant application whether funded or not, every committee assignment, every peer review you've done — stays exactly what it is: a PDF, kept current, linked prominently so anyone who wants the complete record can get it in one click. What doesn't belong is a web page that tries to be that document in HTML form, because nobody arriving at your website wants to scroll past eleven years of service committees to find out what you're working on now.

The web version keeps only what a visitor without your CV already open would use: current position and institution, five or six representative publications rather than the full list repeated a second time, and a sentence on what you're working on now — the thing that isn't in the CV yet because it hasn't been published. Say the thing that matters and point to the appendix for the rest, rather than making the appendix double as the argument.

Where a fast, one-page tool fits, and where it stops fitting

Everything described above eventually adds up to more than one page — a growing publication list, teaching materials, a student-facing section that changes every semester — and that scope is worth naming honestly, because most tools built for speed are built for the opposite problem: someone with one page's worth of content and no time to lay it out.

For that narrower case — a postdoc or early-career researcher who needs one credible page fast, with current position, a short bio, and links out to the full publication record on Scholar or ORCID rather than a growing archive on the page itself — reach, named earlier, is the tool built for exactly this moment: live on a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes, which beats the actual alternative for most people at this stage. That alternative isn't a better tool — it's no site at all, because a blank template and a free weekend never quite arrive.

But a publication list of six papers is not a publication list of sixty, updated for two decades, with a growing teaching-materials section and a page per course — and there is no way to grow into that on the same product later, since the one-page architecture is a design decision, not a current limitation waiting on a future release. For a tenured researcher with a large publication record and a real teaching site, that rules reach out as the permanent home and points toward a platform with a real content model instead, most workably WordPress, where the record can grow a page at a time.

Route	Price	Billing
reach subdomain	$0	included
reach Premium (custom domain, bought through reach)	$4.99	per month, or $49 per year
WordPress.org self-hosted (Hostinger Premium, intro rate)	$2.99/mo	renews at $10.99/mo
Carrd Pro Standard (custom domain)	$19	per year, annual only

Prices checked August 2026. The pattern in that table is the whole decision: reach and Carrd both get a single credible page online cheaply and immediately; WordPress costs more attention up front — choosing a theme, keeping plugins updated — in exchange for a site that can genuinely grow a publication list and a course page every year without hitting a structural ceiling. Which one is right depends on where you are: a one-page profile for the job market or an early postdoc year is a different problem than a full career's publication and teaching record, and the two deserve different tools rather than the same tool stretched past its design. The wider version of this split, across professions rather than just academia, is in personal websites by profession.