What to put on a personal website

Five things, and the list is shorter than people expect. Your name and a headline someone could repeat back after reading it once. A short paragraph in your own voice about what you do and what you are looking for. Selected work, with the emphasis on selected. Enough of a career history that a reader can place you. And an obvious way to get in touch.

That is a page, not a website. Single page is almost always the right shape for this, because the alternative is a navigation menu that asks a reader to choose which part of you to look at, and most of them will choose to leave instead.

The headline is the line worth spending real time on. "Senior Backend Engineer" tells a reader your job title, which they could get from LinkedIn. "I make payment systems that do not lose money at three in the morning" tells them what you are for. One of those gets repeated to a colleague and the other does not.

Your postal address, which is a resume convention that becomes a privacy problem the moment it is on a public URL. "References available on request", which means nothing outside a printed document. Skill bar charts, because a reader knows that a claim to be 87% good at something is unfalsifiable and will silently discount everything near it.

Also leave off the things that are true but load-bearing for nobody: every job you have ever held rather than the ones that make your case, every technology you have ever touched, and the hobbies section unless a hobby is genuinely part of the argument. A page is judged by its weakest item, not its best, which means every marginal inclusion costs you something.

The hardest cut is usually the project you are proud of that does not fit the job you want next. Keeping it is a decision to be read as the person who did that, and that is sometimes the right call. Just make it on purpose rather than by default.

Whatever you most want to be hired for goes highest, even when it is not the most recent thing you did, and even when that 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. If you spent the last year on something you do not want to repeat, it does not have to be the first thing anyone reads, and putting it there because it happened most recently is letting the calendar make a decision that is yours.

This is also the part software gets wrong. A tool can pull the structure out of your resume and lay it out well, and it will keep your existing order because it has no way of knowing which job you are trying to leave. Fixing the ordering yourself takes a minute and is most of the difference between a page that reads as generated and one that reads as yours.

Sometimes not, and it is worth checking before you spend an afternoon. If you are an academic, your institutional page plus a scholar profile is what people in your field actually look at, and a separate personal site is a third place to keep updated for very little return. If your field has a platform where the work lives and the audience already is, being good there beats being findable on your own domain.

The case for your own page is strongest when the work needs framing rather than displaying: when the interesting content is what you decided and why, when your history argues for a job you are trying to leave, or when you need one link that does not depend on a company continuing to exist.

If that is you, the content problem is smaller than it feels, because your resume already resolved most of it. DebutPage drafts the page from that PDF and lets you restyle it by describing what you want, which leaves you free to spend your time on the ordering and the cutting, which is where the value actually is.