Five years ago we wrote a column about personal Web pages at a time when they were just beginning to be used in the job search. Now it's much more common for scholars and researchers to have Web sites as graduate students, as job candidates, and as established professionals.
Technology has improved. A musical composition can be heard in performance online. It no longer takes forever to download design work or pictures of molecular structure or educational-technology training programs.
We see many advantages to having a good Web site. Organizing one helps you organize your own thinking about your background and interests and how you want to present them. Including your Web address on your CV makes it easy for search committees to see unsolicited information you might wisely hesitate to include with your application so as not to inundate them with paper. Material on your site may be picked up by search engines and give your work a wider audience than it otherwise might have.
On the other hand, it's surely better to have no Web site at all than to have one that leaves a poor impression. A site with compromising personal photographs, broken links, inadequate professional content, and poor organization will leave some readers determined never to waste time interviewing you. A similar fate is likely to await you if your site takes overly long to load, is hard to read, or is hosted by a vendor that provides pop-up ads.
Your Web site doesn't need to be fancy. Despite technological developments that make it relatively easy to produce a graphically sophisticated site, you can still easily convey a great deal of important information using only the most basic HTML commands. Take a look at the Web site of this recent Ph.D. It was simple to construct but nevertheless gives a great deal of information.
When we asked readers to submit their Web pages to us for critiques, we received links from people writing their dissertations, people actively on the job market, and people who appear to be established and comfortable where they are. The range of materials presented was varied and fascinating. We hope that our brief discussion of good examples here will help you to evaluate your site if you already have one and to develop a good one if you don't.
We noticed that many sites managed to convey how people balanced their interests in teaching versus research, simply by the type of information they chose to include and how much prominence they gave it. Some academics, particularly the more established ones, also presented themselves in the context of the institution for which they worked. Some pages gave the impression that people preferred to work individually; others that people preferred to work collaboratively. Such impressions can be very effective or misleading, depending on whether they reflect your actual situation. As you develop your own page, make sure the impression it gives is the one you are trying to convey.
We liked the way an assistant professor of biology integrated his research and teaching experience on his laboratory's Web site. It summarizes the researcher's three main interests and includes separate links to graduate and undergraduate research projects done in the lab. Showcasing students' work indicates that the supervisor values it and could be helpful both in demonstrating his effectiveness as a research supervisor and in attracting strong students. This site has a separate section for the researcher's publications. It would have been a nice touch to also link related publications to each of his three research interests.
Faculty members can use a site to, among other things, provide information to their students. On his home page, an associate professor of physics and astronomy lists three course titles under his picture and follows the list with this question: "Are you considering taking a class from this man?" Click on it and the link takes you to tabulated student evaluations with comments, several of them thanking the professor for posting lecture notes on his Web site. Portions of the comments are highlighted so that readers can easily identify such topics as what students think of his grading policy.
An assistant professor of political science who was on sabbatical during the spring semester used his Web site to inform students of the courses he'll teach in the fall semester. Each course has its own link that includes a syllabus and related links. The site also offers a place for students to post their papers, an online discussion, and links to information on internships that can involve students in political activism and political research.
How much personal information to include on your home page is a judgment call. There is no need to have pictures of your cats, wedding, or adorable young children, but we notice that many people do. The more you put on your Web site, the more you will communicate your personality, for better or worse. If you're willing, or even eager, to go out on a limb and have your site elicit strong reactions, both positive and negative, then including personal information can be a good idea. If not, you may want to stick to your professional persona.
Be aware that any personal data you provide on your site could also be a basis for illegal discrimination by employers. We notice that more fathers with young children than mothers seem to post pictures of their progeny, probably because men perceive, correctly, that doing so may make them seem well-rounded, while women perceive that such pictures will raise questions about their commitment to work.
Established academics are particularly free to mix the professional and the personal creatively. A community-college administrator and adjunct professor of psychology has done so with a biographical slide show that we enjoyed. On another site, a biologist has links to humorous, illustrated poetry relating to her field of research, shallow lakes.
If you use a photograph of yourself, consider using one taken in a professional context. For example, an anthropologist's site shows him doing interviews for his research in Puerto Rico. A postdoctoral fellow has chosen a picture of himself with colleagues, a very nice way to portray oneself as engaged in collaborative research.
We've only touched on some of the interesting features that we found on sites that were submitted to us. We encourage you do your own surfing to find more examples. If you go to an educational institution's Web site, you will usually find a fairly easy way to locate the home pages of faculty members, students, and postdocs. Sometimes you'll need to go to individual departmental pages to reach these links.
Of all of the Web sites mentioned above, we chose one for a more detailed comment because it seemed especially strong. Without a lot of bells and whistles and with an uncluttered format, the anthropologist's site presents a lot of information that is easy to navigate. The presentation would be appropriate for anyone who took teaching seriously, yet also would work in a research-driven environment.
The professor's home page has a simple but sophisticated presentation: At the top of the page is a blue bar with six categories of information: home, CV, papers, research, teaching, and links. Clicking on CV brings up the scholar's vita in a linked format, with a pull-down menu of its main sections. A side column on the page includes printing options and a "What's New?" section. Under teaching, you can see the courses the author has taught as well as links to details on each. The links page provides the navigational option of selecting a category or browsing through an impressive listing of research links.
Graphically, the look of the site is clean and understated, using a little color to emphasize the organization rather than for its own sake. Our main suggestion for improving the site is that on the home page, under the professor's name, the only two links are to the Web sites of his university and school. The effect of that is to draw the reader's attention more to the institution than to the individual.
Getting Started
If you don't currently have a Web site and would like to develop one, here are two good ways to get started: Your university, or the particular school you are affiliated with, may have a technology center that offers either courses or individual assistance. Otherwise, we suggest you develop and organize the content that you would like to post and then pay an undergraduate to guide you through the process of turning it into a Web site. If you've done the work yourself, you'll be able to make the necessary changes to keep the site current. Here are some additional guidelines:
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Choose a clear, obvious form of organization.
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Make sure your home page conveys information, rather than serving as a purely visual lead-in, so the reader doesn't have to click again before getting to something of substance.
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Choose a readable background. White text on a black background, while popular, is too hard to read.
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If you include a lot of graphic or audio material, test your site regularly to make sure it loads quickly.
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Test your site using both Internet Explorer and Netscape to make sure the results are what you intended.
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Remember that the Internet also makes it easy to steal material. Think twice about using the site to present important original material that hasn't been published as a paper or presented at a conference.
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Once the site is completed, review all its links every week or two to make sure they're all current.
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Remember that you're addressing a professional audience. Avoid posting anything you wouldn't want a potential employer to see.
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If you're in a field where visual presentation is important, then make sure your site is visually appealing.
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