One important step to having a good online scholarly presence is to have your own professional website. Weebly is a fairly easy to use and free content management system that you can use to create a customized page for yourself or a team. It is one of the website builders supported by the iSchool, which you can find more information about at this link.
How to Create a Weebly Website
Step 1) Login to Weebly either by creating a new Weebly account or linking to a Facebook or Gmail account. If this is a professional website think very carefully about whether or not you want this in any way connected to your Facebook (after all, future employers don’t care how much fun you had during spring break or want to see those conspiracy theory articles your uncle keeps sharing).
Step 2) Choose a theme! There used to be a lot more themes available on Weebly but those days are over. You have a couple options for very basic themes that with the addition of some images will help you instantly create a classy portfolio page, and any theme is fair game, though the ones under “Portfolio” and “Personal” and “Blog” are more suited for creating a professional website.
Step 3) You will be prompted to choose your web domain. You can have a free dot weebly site. Try to get some variation on your name as your website, you can also use the name of your company or organization.
Note: as of writing (23 Jan. 2017) this Weebly domain name is still available!
However, if this is too much pressure for now you can start creating your site and won’t have to really settle down on a name until you publish the site.
If inspiration strikes before that go to Settings > Site Address
Step 4) Adding pages. Whichever theme you choose likely comes with Home, Blog, Contact pages that you can click on different elements of to edit. However, to add a new page or a certain type of page:
Step 5) Customizing Pages. For simple edits, simply click on what you want to replace and add new content. To add new content, there’s a sidebar full of options! Even more if you add apps to your site or pay for Weebly. Simply drag and drop and arrange the content types on your site.
As an example, we’ll create a contact page.
If you want people to reach out to you it’s great to have a page where they can do that. We do not recommend writing your email out on pages because that’s a good way for spambots to find you. However, Weebly makes it easy to add a contact form: simply Click “Build” and drag and drop the contact form.
If you have a physical location where you tend to be such as an office (lucky you!) or a coffee shop that pretty much is your office, then you can add a Google map as well to show people what building it is in. Though if your office is in the Armory (or certain parts of Main Library for that matter) you should probably include more specific instructions so that people don’t spend years trying to find it. You can also link your LinkedIn profile to your site by dragging and dropping that icon as well.
And don’t forget to include your ORCID, (if you haven’t created one yet, we suggest you check out this ORCID information)!
Special note: Adding stock images
Of course, your professional website should include at least one picture of you in a professional setting. Weebly has a number of stock images you can choose from that can look very nice. But what if you want something a bit more customized? For your professional website, make sure that you have proper permissions for any images that you use! Copyright infringement is very unprofessional. To learn more about finding copyright friendly stock images check out the Finding and Using Images LibGuide. And please feel free to take a look at our Scholarly Commons copyright resources. For more specific questions, you can reach out to Assistant Professor & Copyright Librarian Sara Benson.
Further Resources:
Still confused about Online Scholarly Presence? We have not one but TWO LibGuides to help you understand: Online Scholarly Presence Seminar and Create & Manage an Online Scholarly Presence.
Here is a video from a few years ago explaining more in general about creating a professional website, hosted by the University of Illinois.