How to Make an Academic Website, Step by Step

Everything downstream — tone, selection, ordering — depends on the primary reader. Pick one: hiring committees and PIs (lead with publications and research direction), grant panels and collaborators (lead with research themes and what you bring to a team), or industry recruiters (lead with projects, skills and artifacts — code, analyses, dashboards).

You can serve secondary audiences with subpages. You can't serve them all on one homepage.

Before touching any tool, collect into one folder:

• Every publication and preprint: full citation, DOI or arXiv link, abstract, your author position
• Projects that produced something showable: code, datasets, posters, talks, dashboards
• Teaching: courses, supervision, materials you're proud of
• A current CV (PDF)
• One decent photo of your face
• Links you already maintain: ORCID, Google Scholar, GitHub, LinkedIn

This step is where most portfolio attempts stall — do it first, badly, in an hour. Polishing comes later.

Three honest routes:

• DIY (GitHub Pages, Hugo, Quarto, Jekyll)— free and fully yours, but "no coding required" is not true of any of them: you'll work with Git, Markdown files and YAML configuration, and you own every breakage forever.
• Your university profile page— zero effort, but you don't control the format, and it stays behind when you change institutions — exactly when you need it most.
• A portfolio or website builder— you trade some money or flexibility for never thinking about hosting. Dedicated academic builders (Owlstown, faculty.bio, Scilio — the one we make) understand publications. Generic builders (Wix, Squarespace) don't.

Which one is right depends on your time, budget and tolerance for maintenance — we compare all of them honestly, with current prices, in Academic Website Builders Compared: No-Code Options in 2026. If you're weighing the two academic builders directly, there's also a side-by-side Scilio vs. Owlstown comparison.

The structure that recurs across the strongest real portfolios we reviewed: who you are (name, role, institution, one-sentence research identity), what you work on (2–4 research themes in plain language), selected publications (not all of them — the ones that define you), projects (the non-paper work), and contact and profiles (email, ORCID, Scholar, GitHub).

Resist inventing sections you can't fill. An empty "Teaching" page signals neglect louder than its absence would — several portfolios in our examples collection make exactly this mistake, with skeleton sections holding one line each.

Three sentences beat three paragraphs: your role and institution ("I'm a PhD candidate in X at Y"), the question you work on — phrased so a non-specialist could repeat it (the best faculty site we reviewed frames its entire research agenda as questions) — and, if you're comfortable saying so, what you're looking for: a postdoc, collaborators, industry roles.

Write in first person. "Dr. X is a researcher who…" reads like a conference program bio. Your own site can just talk to the viewer.

This is where research portfolios diverge from every other portfolio type, and where most tools and templates fail you. For each paper:

• Full citation— all authors in order (never "et al." yourself out of your own paper), venue, year
• A working link — DOI first; arXiv or an accepted-manuscript PDF where the DOI is paywalled
• The abstract, or better, a two-sentence plain-language version
• The artifacts — code repository, dataset, poster, talk recording. The strongest sites we reviewed attach code and data links to every single paper; it signals open science and gives every reader something to click.
• Preprints and "under review" work — include them, clearly labeled. In fast-moving fields the strongest portfolios give preprints their own section.

Group by year once you're past a handful of papers. And this is the honest place to mention what we build: Scilio treats each publication as a structured entry — authors, abstract, tags, dates — rather than a blob of text, because this step is the one a generic website builder can't do for you.

If you're early in your PhD, this section is your portfolio. Datasets, software, analysis writeups, posters, a well-documented replication — anything with an artifact counts. Two rules from the strong examples we reviewed:

• Every claim needs an artifact.A skills list with nothing to click is the weakest pattern we saw — one "computational biology" portfolio listed positions and skills but not a single piece of visible work.
• Give projects a narrative thread. The best project-based portfolio we reviewed ties diverse projects together with one stated interest, so the collection reads as a direction rather than a heap.

A portfolio nobody finds is a diary. On launch day, put the URL in your email signature, your Google Scholar profile, your ORCID record, your GitHub profile and LinkedIn — and on your conference slides (title and end slide). If your university profile allows a personal-website field, fill it.

Search engines take days to weeks to index a new site; the links above are how both people and crawlers find you in the meantime.

The single most common failure mode in every batch of academic sites we reviewed: the dead portfolio — copyright frozen years ago, newest paper missing, blog announcing a talk from 2022. A stale portfolio actively hurts you; it suggests the work stopped.

The fix is not discipline, it's reduction: cut every section you won't update (especially blogs — the graveyard of academic websites), add a paper the week it's accepted — that's the entire maintenance ritual — and steal the best freshness trick we saw: an explicit "last updated" date, which turns maintenance into a visible feature.