How to turn your resume into a website

Most people who set out to build a personal site never finish, and it is usually not for lack of skill. It is that a website builder opens on an empty canvas and asks you to be a designer, a copywriter and an information architect before you have written a sentence. That is three jobs, and none of them is the one you were trying to do.

Your resume has already resolved the hardest of those. It contains your work history in a defensible order, the projects you decided were worth mentioning, the skills you are prepared to be asked about, and a description of yourself that survived contact with an actual job application. Those decisions were expensive to make. Starting from a blank page throws all of them away.

A resume and a personal site are read under completely different conditions, and copying one into the other verbatim is the most common mistake. A resume is skimmed for about seven seconds by someone who has thirty more to get through, so it is compressed to the point of shorthand. A site is opened by someone who has already decided you are interesting enough to look up. They have more patience and more questions.

So the density should drop and the specificity should rise. A resume bullet reading "Led migration to event-driven architecture" is correct but nearly contentless on a page with room to breathe. On a site it can become three sentences: what was breaking, what you chose, what it cost you. That is the same fact with the part that persuades left in.

A few things should not make the trip at all. Your full postal address is a resume convention that becomes a privacy problem on a public URL. "References available on request" means nothing outside a printed document. Skill bar charts claiming you are 87% good at Python are unfalsifiable, and a reader knows it. The objective statement at the top, if you still have one, is usually better as a plain sentence about what you are doing now.

A personal site does not need to be long, and single-page is almost always right for this. Name and a headline someone could repeat back after reading it once. A short paragraph in your own voice. Selected work, with the emphasis on selected: three things you can talk about beats nine you listed. Then somewhere obvious to contact you.

The ordering matters more than the count. Whatever you most want to be hired for goes highest, even when that is not the most recent thing you did, and even when it breaks the reverse-chronological habit a resume trained into you. A site is not a legal record of employment. It is an argument, and an argument leads with its strongest point.

This translation is mechanical enough that software can do the first pass. DebutPage reads your resume PDF and drafts the whole page from it: it pulls out the structure, writes the connective copy, and picks a layout, which takes about two minutes rather than a weekend. You then adjust it by describing what you want in plain language, so "dark mode with a teal accent" or "make my name bigger" is the whole interaction. No design tool to learn.

You can build the entire site before making an account, which is deliberate: you should be able to see the result on your own resume before deciding whether it is worth signing up for. You only make an account at the point of publishing.

What it cannot do is invent the judgement. It will not know which two projects are the ones you actually want to be asked about, and it will not know that the job you list third is the one you want next. Fix the ordering yourself. That edit takes a minute and is most of the difference between a page that reads as generated and one that reads as yours.