How To Quickly Build a Personal Website For Your Job Search

Use a free personal website to attract proactive employers online.

This is a guest post by Keyavash Monshi. If you’d also like to guest post here on JobMob, follow these guest post guidelines.

Building a website is a great way to help you find a job, you just have to go about it in a different way than a traditional website. Not only will it be easy to set up, it will also be cost effective as I will help you go through the steps you should follow and the free tools you should use.

1) Pick a website platform

The first thing you should do is pick a platform to build your website on.

The two I would look at are Weebly and Wix. Both are great free platforms for building websites and each has their advantages.

Weebly tends to have simpler and blocky templates, but easy to design. The drag and drop interface is very user friendly.

Wix is Flash-based and gives you a little more leeway with the tweaking of your site. It lets you add a more personal touch to your site and is great for people looking for jobs in artistic or creative areas.

2) Design the home page

Next comes designing the home page. Since this is going to be the first impression for an employer, it has to look good.

Include some type of media to introduce yourself, either through a picture or a video. Also include some information about yourself, but don't just put your entire resume on the home page. Instead, pick the highlights of your resume that you think employers will be hooked with.

3) Add a portfolio

Add another page that will show potential employers examples of your work.

There are different ways you can do this, and if you are able to show examples through pictures or a video, then by all means do so. Both platforms mentioned above let you add photo galleries, and if you are going to use a video, Playwire is a good free unbranded professional player.

You can also use articles to show examples or even use testimonials from previous employers.

4) Add your resume

Now we get to your resume, which you previewed on the home page.

Go through everything you would on a normal resume. You can build it using elements within your website editor, or better-  use an online resume builder which you can then embed into your site or just link to. Some great online builders to look at are ResumeBaking and Comoto.

Let employers download your resume so they can have a soft copy.

Include a way for an employer to contact you directly from your site. A great tool for this is the EmailMe Button which is free and creates a nice button that brings up a contact form.

5) Final touches

Some last touches you should add:

• Learn how to get your website indexed in search engines with keywords relating to the job you are trying to get.
• Join Twitter and LinkedIn to allow more ways to contact you, and to get access to sites like Tweetajob, which will notify you of jobs that you might be interested in.
• Add a QR code to your business card, which employers can scan to instantly be brought to your website.

About the Author

Keyavash Monshi is a college student studying biology that hopes to go to dental school afterwards. For more articles on web design and free tools check out http://www.siteunleashed.com/.

This article is part of the Over $5000 in Prizes: The 5th Annual JobMob Guest Blogging Contest, which was made possible thanks in large part to our sponsors:

	Marcus Tandler’s JOBlog is Germany’s oldest blog about job search & careers.
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If you liked this article, you'll also enjoy 9 Thoughts On Branding Yourself With A Personal Website For Your Job Search.

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