A profitable and well-run web site can completely go in your resume, and it reveals future employers or enterprise connections that you just’ve obtained ambition, expertise, and drive. However constructing and internet hosting a legit-looking web site prices cash.
That’s why we’ve obtained a listing of 5 cheap, low-investment web site concepts to construct with a bowl of ramen steaming in your dorm room desk.
1. Private Weblog
A private weblog is the proper spot to share your distinctive view of the world with a much bigger group than the one you’ll discover on campus.
However it’s greater than only a inventive outlet. A private weblog helps you place the abilities you’re studying in your courses to good use. You’ll want to jot down copy, do analysis, inform tales, and design an internet site. These are all wonderful expertise to refine with a private weblog!
Professionally, a robust private weblog is one thing you possibly can usually hyperlink to on social media. That features LinkedIn, the gold mine of profession alternatives. When you actually put some elbow grease into it, you may even be capable of make money with your personal blog.
One in every of my favourite blogs is The Blonde Abroad.
This weblog has a really particular audience: solo feminine vacationers. And it pulls in loads of visitors, too—over 170k visits in December 2024 alone.
The weblog started with the creator, Kiki, ditched her company finance job and all the standard expectations assigned to girls and began touring around the globe by herself.
You’ll discover all the main points about these travels on The Blonde Overseas. The net design is pleasant however uncomplicated—one thing you can easily design with WordPress. Little postcard-shaped tidbits draw you in to The Blonde Overseas’s prime posts.
Um, sure I do need to see what rotten thing you ate, Kiki. (It was an Icelandic delicacy referred to as kæstur hákarl. If you recognize, you recognize.) And sure I would wish to be taught extra a couple of lodge the place giraffes routinely greet you at your door.
Together with these extra thrilling and interesting kinds of posts, The Blonde Overseas presents assets for secure solo journey, prime locations for various journey targets, and suggestions for seeing the world on a funds.
Does this imply you, a university pupil, should ditch your research and begin flying around the globe?
No! (Though for those who do get an opportunity to journey whilst you’re younger, I extremely advocate it.)
You don’t have to jot down about journey in any respect. In truth, it’s best to write about one thing that’s attention-grabbing to you. One thing you’re enthusiastic about.
Listed here are a couple of tricks to get you going.
The best way to get began with a private weblog:
- Choose a platform: Use free or inexpensive platforms like WordPress.com, Blogger, or Wix to arrange your weblog without making your wallet cry.
- Outline your area of interest: Concentrate on one thing you’re enthusiastic about, like pupil life overseas, trend, sports activities, and even native adventures in your faculty city.
- Begin easy: Select an uncluttered theme and write content that resonates together with your viewers. Use a free key phrase instrument like Ahrefs Key phrase Generator to seek out matters individuals are trying to find. Keep away from overloading the net design with pointless bells and whistles.
- Share persistently: Consistency is queen after we’re speaking about constructing a weblog viewers. Even brief updates or fast suggestions can keep momentum. Simply don’t get all excited, publish a bunch of blogs, and cease posting inside weeks after a significant blogger burnout. As a substitute, get all excited, write a bunch of blogs, and publish 1-2 a month as an alternative of all of sudden. Give your self slightly breather after which write some extra. Tempo your self, and also you’ll keep motivated.
- Promote on social media: Use platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and X (RIP Twitter).
2. Portfolio Web site
When you’re finding out the humanities, there’s a very good likelihood you’re an artist of some variety. Whether or not you’re a budding author, visible artist, actor, graphic designer, filmmaker, or music performer, there’s an excellent higher likelihood you’ve gotten created tangible artworks. Identical goes for those who’re an internet designer, coder, sport designer, and doubtless a lot, rather more.
A portfolio web site is simply the place to showcase that work. And belief me: you’ll be linking to that web site a lot as you carve a spot for your self on this planet. I used to be an English main as an undergrad, and I actually would’ve benefitted from constructing a easy portfolio of my greatest papers and publishing them on an internet site.
Clearly, not all of my essays had been superb—however one in every of them obtained accepted for presentation at a Sigma Tau Delta convention in Savannah, Georgia. My college’s English division funded my journey to the convention to current it—a enjoyable, deliciously skilled, and barely terrifying expertise for a 20-year-old.
Later, two of my nonfiction essays obtained revealed in small, super-niche magazines after I submitted them as a part of a category I used to be taking.
These had been early seeds of my eventual freelance profession. I’ve a portfolio now, and potential freelance purchasers virtually all the time ask to see it after I attain out to use for a gig. And in the event that they don’t ask, I share it anyway—or not less than my greatest items from the portfolio. How else would they know if we’re a very good match?
I solely want I’d began a portfolio sooner. Not like me, you may get forward of the sport with a portfolio web site proper now, whilst you’re nonetheless a pupil.
Probably the greatest issues about this kind of web site is it doesn’t take all that a lot work to take care of after you set it up. The purpose of the positioning is to let the items in your portfolio do the speaking.
Take Lauren Hom’s portfolio website, for instance. While you go to Hom Candy Hom, you’ll first see a photograph of the designer and lettering artist, together with a fast intro.
Scroll down a bit extra and also you’ll see a formidable listing of manufacturers Hom has labored with—Goal, Google, Adobe, and Starbucks amongst them—after which the portfolio begins.
The pictures are fascinating, and each hyperlinks to a web page that tells you slightly extra concerning the piece.
See that Goal reward card design? Hom used powdered sugar to create the distinctive design. And the Squeeze the Day journal was impressed by memories of Hom’s cheerful grandmother.
However Hom additionally consists of private work within the portfolio, just like the mural painted in Hom’s studio. And the trippy flour power piece.
When you look slightly nearer, Hom even hints at the role the internet played in serving to land large gigs proper out of faculty.
Perhaps an early on-line portfolio had one thing to do with this?
Right here’s what to remember as you design your portfolio web site.
The best way to get began with a portfolio web site:
- Choose the appropriate platform: Web site builders like Webflow, Wix, or Squarespace are nice for clear, easy, user-friendly portfolio web sites. These additionally mechanically make a mobile-responsive model of your web site for folks viewing it on their telephones.
- Curate your greatest work: Keep away from clogging your portfolio with every little thing you’ve ever labored on. As a substitute, showcase initiatives that basically make your expertise shine. Mess around with data to pair with each bit. Slightly little bit of context goes a great distance, however don’t fear about writing paragraphs upon paragraphs to clarify the work. Once more, let it communicate for itself.
- Embrace an about part: Add an ‘About Me’ part to share your story. Why do you create artwork (or web site designs, or costumes, or video video games, or no matter cool factor it’s you do)? What do you hope web site guests will take away out of your portfolio? Embrace contact data so potential colleagues, friends, and even purchasers can simply get in contact.
3. Resume or CV Web site
Everybody wants a resume or curriculum vitae (CV) sooner or later of their life. However for those who plan to work in a area that doesn’t precisely lend itself to portfolio creation, like finance, schooling, legislation, healthcare, or enterprise administration, a resume or CV web site generally is a stand-in for a portfolio, in a way. It will possibly provide help to stand out.
Or, you may make an internet site that homes each your portfolio and a CV/resume.
The hot button is to make your resume web site polished, skilled, and straightforward to soak up. Pupil and developer Diogo Correia’s site is a good instance of this.
The homepage is straightforward, with alluring constellations that dance and flicker on the web page. There’s a small photograph of Correia, a really brief bio, and some buttons on a easy menu.
When you click on on the CV button, you’ll see Correia’s spectacular listing of accomplishments. There’s all types of stuff on there, from Correia’s schooling and awards to his prime programming expertise and work expertise.
Able to create your individual CV or resume-focused web site? Right here’s what to recollect.
The best way to get began with a CV/resume web site:
- Select a minimalist theme: Stability out the dense data in your portfolio with a clear, minimalist theme utilizing an internet site builder like Squarespace or Wix.
- Get a private area: Use your title for the area to provide your web site an expert edge.
- Spotlight key sections: Embrace your work expertise, awards, schooling, expertise, and hyperlinks to portfolios or LinkedIn.
- Add interactivity: Combine a contact kind (straightforward to do with most web site builders!) or downloadable resume possibility so potential employers can save your resume.
- Keep in mind web optimization: Use related key phrases to assist employers or collaborators discover your web site on-line. As a plus, employers’ applicant monitoring methods (ATS) depend on key phrases to assist kind via all of the resumes they get throughout a job utility, so together with key phrases can get you seen quicker.
4. On-line Tutoring or Examine Sources Web site
What would we do with out on-line tutoring and research assets web sites?
Take Khan Academy, for instance. Khan Academy is likely one of the most well-known on-line research websites on this planet. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit has over 8.7 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and greater than 2 billion complete views.
The movies and classes on the web site cowl every little thing from preschool schooling to MCAT (medical college), LSAT (legislation college), and SAT (faculty readiness) prep. No topic is untouched on Khan Academy, from math and science to the humanities, life expertise, economics, and computing.
And it all started with a younger man named Salman Khan and his efforts to information his cousins via thorny college assignments. He lived in a single state they usually lived in one other, which gave him the concept to create an internet tutoring web site. This was a number of years earlier than distant something was as straightforward as it’s right now, so the positioning rapidly gained traction.
When you love serving to different college students work via difficult topics, contemplate beginning your individual tutoring web site. You positively don’t must have Khan Academy-level goals: as of late, the positioning is a full-fledged academic instrument stocked with content material created by specialists in pedagogy to align with state and nationwide grade-level requirements.
Nobody expects you to do that. However a small, targeted tutoring web site might help you acquire essential expertise. Like constructing an internet site, utilizing web optimization to draw visitors, creating academic movies and tutorials, and responding to suggestions.
All whereas showcasing your deep data in a topic (or two).
When you occur to be going into any type of area the place you’ll be instructing or managing different folks, a well-built on-line tutoring web site is a gem in your resume.
The best way to get began with an internet tutoring or research assets web site:
- Outline your area of interest: Concentrate on one particular topic, like algebra or essay writing. Choose one thing you’re good at and enthusiastic about. Later, you possibly can add new topics as your viewers grows.
- Create content material: Use instruments like Loom to document video tutorials or Google Docs for printable assets. Be sure that the supplies are simple, freed from grammatical errors, and straightforward to grasp.
- Construct your web site: Use free platforms like WordPress.com or Wix to create an internet site.
- Promote your assets: Share your web site on pupil boards or unfold the phrase with social media. Inform your folks about it, too! When you usually get requested to assist buddies write their papers, for instance, you can begin pointing them within the path of your web site, the place you’ve conveniently uploaded a 5-minute video that gives a straightforward formulation for writing epic essays on the primary strive.
- Nurture your viewers: Use quizzes and video games to assist hold your net guests studying—and having enjoyable whereas they’re at it. Instruments like Kahoot! and Google Kinds might help you with this half. Go away the feedback part open below your movies so learners can go away questions and suggestions for you. Staying engaged and respectful within the feedback part goes a great distance towards constructing your fame as an teacher and chief.
5. E-Commerce Retailer for Customized Creations
Do you’re keen on creating issues together with your palms? Do you even have a stack of stated issues in your dorm room that you just’re unsure what to do with?
Why not attempt to make slightly cash on the aspect with an e-commerce retailer?
Once I was in faculty, I knew loads of friends who might’ve pulled this off. Throughout my senior 12 months, I took a book-making class for an elective. I assumed it might be about making cool journals to jot down in, or one thing.
However it was not. As a substitute, I discovered myself in a bona fide, 400-level artwork class. I used to be surrounded by extremely gifted artwork college students who might whip up superb, X-acto-knife-sculpted, intricately glued, vibrantly illustrated, meticulously collaged, and delicately mosaiced handmade books.
Every one in every of their creations might have bought for not less than fifty {dollars}, if no more. Kinda like this little piece of artwork on Etsy, bought by FoldAfterFold.
(Sure, that’s an previous e book with the pages folded to appear like a bookshelf with tiny books on it. This piece of artwork would positively have earned its maker an A+ in that bookmaking class.)
My books, alternatively, had been clumsy scrapbooks speckled with literal blood, sweat, and tears from the hours I spent hunched over my kitchen desk with unfamiliar provides sprawled round me.
I as soon as even had a full-fledged breakdown in the midst of class, tears and all. Not a spotlight of my faculty expertise, that’s for positive.
However I scraped by with a very good grade, because of a gracious professor, and great respect for individuals who create magical issues with their palms.
When you’re one in every of them and you want the concept of utilizing your expertise to build a side gig, it’s time to construct an e-commerce storefront on your customized creations.
The best way to get began with an e-commerce retailer for customized creations:
- Choose a platform: In order for you a storefront or web site you may make your individual, Shopify is ideal, however you must usher in your individual visitors and pay a small(ish) month-to-month price to make use of it. Etsy is free to make use of and has a built-in viewers, however there’s much less customizability. And each storefronts do take a share of your gross sales. Be taught the ins and outs of each platforms earlier than you decide!
- Concentrate on a distinct segment: No matter you do, don’t get caught constructing an internet retailer round one thing you hate however suppose will earn money. As a substitute, give attention to one thing you take pleasure in doing—and may take pleasure in doing over and time and again as folks begin shopping for out of your store. It may very well be something from making scarves or earrings to printing designs on shirts or creating soaps and candles.
- Promote your retailer: Use social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to indicate everybody your merchandise. Share behind-the-scenes content material and different insights into your journey as a pupil vendor to attach together with your followers, and interact with them within the feedback part.
- Begin small: Get going with a small, manageable stock and actually pour your focus into making high-quality objects. You may all the time scale when you’re accomplished together with your research.
Make clients comfortable: Present nice service and quick responses, and encourage comfortable clients to depart evaluations. Construct that social proof and your buyer base will develop, slowly however certainly!
