My first attempt to create an academic website.

I decided to build an academic website for a few reasons. First, I wanted to start to have an online presence. Going to conferences made me realize that many researchers nowadays have a strong online presence, with active use of social media and their own academic websites. Even though I am kind of shy, I believe that it’s important to follow the right steps to progress in the career and having a platform to share the scientific outputs and some thoughts regarding the academic life seems to be the right thing to do. Second, I I wanted to experiment with web development and learn more about programming.

The process of building the website is challenging, but it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. After some searches on Google, I found a few blog posts that walked me through the basics of setting up a website.

I had some experience with R, but I was not familiar with web development. So my natural instinct was to search for a tool that could combine my skills in R with website developing. That’s where I found blogdown and wowchemy. This was a perfect match for my expectations and I dig into it, and in less than a day, I had my own academic website set up for free.

So far the website is very basic and I am still learning, but I see it as a work in progress, and I plan to continue working on it in the future. Right now, my focus is on adding more content and improving the design of the site.

Stay tuned for improvements :)