How to Build a Personal Website for the Academic Job Market
Applying for faculty positions, postdocs, or research roles comes with an expectation a general job search doesn't: search committees and collaborators will look for your website, and a lot of them do it before they finish reading your CV. This is a different page than a general personal website for a job search, which is built around a resume and work history for corporate and operational roles. An academic site needs to lead with research, not a job history, publications, a research statement, and often a teaching philosophy matter more here than anywhere else this kind of page gets used.
Describing your background to Nova, for example "an academic website for a PhD candidate on the job market in cognitive psychology, with a research summary, publications list, teaching experience, and a CV download," produces a site structured around that description, with a live preview you can review before publishing, all without an account until you're ready to save the project or publish it long-term on a getnova.pro subdomain. Because the research summary and publications section reflect your actual work rather than a generic "aspiring researcher" template, the draft starts closer to something a search committee member would actually read past the first paragraph.
A few things worth getting right specifically for this audience. Keep a downloadable CV or PDF available even though the site exists, since many applications and committee members still expect that specific format. If your field cares about a specific citation or listing order for publications, apply that consistently rather than letting a generic list format flatten distinctions that matter in your discipline. And update the site each cycle, a stale "in progress" dissertation status or an outdated publication list is a small but real signal to anyone checking.
FAQ
Alongside it. Keep a current, downloadable CV on the site itself, since that specific format is still what most applications and many committee members expect to see.
Describe that context to Nova directly, for example a graduate student with conference presentations and work in progress rather than a long publication record, and the draft will reflect that honestly instead of overstating your record.
Many candidates do, especially if the site is meant to give a committee member a fast sense of your work before they read the full statement submitted with your application; keep it as a shorter version of that same statement rather than a different pitch.
Describe your research and background to Nova and see a site built for the academic job market before your next application deadline.