Help me contract somebody to design a personal/academic/faculty candidate website.

Hiring committee view: never forget that there are 50 other candidates to look at today. Some search committees don't even look at all. Tell me what you are, what you do, and why it's interesting right in the top centre. Then have some obvious links to your CV (so I can check it against what you sent in your application pack...) and pdfs of as many of your publications as possible. Maybe a couple of photos of your research in action, to humanise the process, but that's it. Look at the information density on Heer's page you linked to. Your outreach activities, personal interests, blog/FB/Twitter, thesis, student recommendations, Mendeley or academic.edu profiles are not going to get read unless you get through the first cut and are likely to succeed at interview on the strength of your publications and funding. Even then I know a lot of people who would just ask "why has this person not been writing grants or papers with this time instead?". I guess you could hire someone, but I wouldn't bother.

Academic hiring committees/faculty: What impresses you the most about faculty candidate web pages? A bar at the top that has items for CV, research, and teaching. A research page with links to pdfs of publications and papers, hosted locally instead of a link to the publisher's page for it -- if I'm checking your info from home, I'm not going to try to navigate around paywalls. A teaching page with links to syllabi or, if you have not taught any/much, proposed/sample syllabi. This is one of those your mileage may vary kinds of things. Some people are going to be deeply impressed by a well-organized web presence. Myself, I look at that and think that the person hired a pretty good web designer... but why should I be impressed by that fact that you happened to hire a good web designer? So, me, I favor simplicity of navigation and clarity.

I'm on the academic job market too (and have been in previous cycles). Some suggestions: 1. You don't need a really impressive page. Being TOO flashy/nice might be a turn off. The pages that you linked to are not too flashy though. And paying someone to do this is probably overkill. 2. Most everyone that I know does the following: a. an Academia.edu profile b. a Wordpress page (the page that you linked to was basic enough.) 3. You want your CV in PDF form and in textual form up there. 4. You want to have a blog (that is frequently updated) that makes you sound smart about your topic I think that what is wrong with your current page is: - the font - that I don't know immediately what your research is - the color scheme being chromatic And I think that with a new wordpress theme, you could fix this yourself. Here's http://katypearce.net/cv/ (that I host on a public, non-academic domain name... although I have my academic affiliated webpages redirect to this page). My "tabs" or "sections" are: Homepage (blog) Caucasus Barometer (a dataset that I work with a lot) Contact & Social (links to Mendeley, Twitter, etc.) CV Dissertation (diss abstract) Presentations (could put slides up here too) Publications Research (a summary of what I research) Teaching (just a list)

I'm an assistant prof on the tenure track in the US. I like nice, simple, professional websites that have limited or no personal information. http://www.ils.unc.edu/~dianek/index.html (and note that the only not-work related thing on there is a link to an organization I'm guessing she feels strongly about). http://www.biology.duke.edu/baughlab/ But, again, this is pretty simple. Unless your design skills are relevant to your job, I'd be worried about having something too slick. The Prof Hacker blog on the Chronicle of Higher Ed website had a http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/do-you-need-your-own-website-while-on-the-job-market/35825 just recently.

On a hiring committee, I do not bother looking at a candidate's web page. If I did, like ROU Xenophobe, I would want it to be simple and clear and just list the basics like k8t said.

Selfishly - links to syllabi are a good idea? Will do!

I run the hiring committee for a major university department. I wouldn't even look at your website unless you make it to our long list and were being considered for the short list. Even then, I wouldn't expect you to have something professionally done. In fact, it might be a little strange. All the examples above are good ones.

Students/faculty: What personal academic websites have you found the most impressive/helpful? http://www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/'s of the University of North Carolina, in the USA. I pick this not because the design is special, but because it's helpful. The design is clean and simple, and that's good for me. The order in the menu implies a focus on students, because "Courses" is the first choice. There he links to his syllabi. For a student with the same interests as him, it's a great site. One thing that's good to link to or include is work by your students, or something similar. That helps other students imagine what they might do under your tutelage.

Thanks everybody for taking the time to help answer this. I am guessing that it might be best for me to focus on getting the content and basic layout of the site right first before I get involved with a professional developer (though I still want to use one :)