What to Include on a Personal Website

For Software Engineering or Related Professions

3 min readDec 18, 2015

My Personal Website — http://stevejones.io

Home Page

Keep it simple — include your name and one sentence to describe the most important thing you want to communicate with a visitor of your site. Also include links to the other content of your site.

Projects

List any projects that you’ve done that demonstrate your skills. Include thumbnail images if possible. You can have each project link to a page on your site that displays more information about the project. Or have the link open a new tab with your project on GitHub or another third party site.

Portfolio

If you have design experience consider including a portfolio section. If you already have an established portfolio on a site like Behance or Dribbble, look into seeing how you can embed that portfolio into your website.

Resume

Include a link to your resume on your homepage. Have that link direct to a PDF version of your resume. This way employers can easily download it. I’ve found this advantageous over including a resume on your site as HTML.

Many employers are having applicants submit a link to your resume rather than an attachment. Having a PDF in your root directory allows you to link to it using yourdomain.com/resume.pdf. Using a PDF also means employers will see it in the common form they are used to reviewing resumes.

Disclaimer: If you have your resume posted online MAKE SURE IT’S UP TO DATE. Having an employer find an outdated resume may give them a bad impression. If you can’t keep it updated consider not including it. To help make sure the resume on your site is your most up to date version consider configuring the folder your containing your resume is automatically pushed to your GitHub site whenever it is edited. Check out this GitWatch repo for a way to enable this.

For a guide with tips on creating a software engineering resume check out my article on Software Engineer Resume — Best Practices

Contact

Don’t forget to include your email! Employers are sometimes impressed if you have a yourname@yourdomain.com email address. When reviewing my resume I’ve often had recruiters appreciate my steve@stevenjon.es email address.

Include links (preferably with icons) to your online accounts such as LinkedIn, GitHub, your blog, portfolio, Twitter, etc.

Portfolio Website Guide Directory

This article is part of a guide to building a portfolio website to help land a software engineering position. It includes a link to my portfolio website’s public GitHub repository that I welcome you to clone and use as a template.

Check out other resources in the guide below:

GitHub Repository — Portfolio Website

My Portfolio Website: http://stevejones.io

Questions?

Shoot me an email, I’m happy to help: steve@stevejones.io