Personal Website Construction

Reinventing the wheel is not such a great idea when you are building a personal site. Building your own CMS is fun, and to some degree is something to brag about, but not so much features you won't have the time to build and all the security holes that you won't have the time to fix.

It's much better to pick a good, well-established engine, build a custom theme, and contribute a module or two to it: you'll be writing code that you can show off as a code sample and at the same time creating something useful.

Knowing your way around an open source CMS is a good skill in just about any job: when your boss says - hey, we need a three pager site for client/product/person X in 10 hours, you can say - no problem.

I've toyed with this idea in the past but I don't think it's really a good idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are a number of places that can take care of most of this without you needing to do the work or maintenance. Just signing up for a linkedIn account for example will allow you to get most of your needs catered for in this regard. You can create your resume there and bio information etc and make it publicly viewable. The other issue with your "own site" is that if you don't update it often, the information gets stale, and worse yet, people have no reason to go back because *"nothing has changed"* - and that's not much of an *advert* for you is it?

Now that I've said all that, I'll make another recommendation. Why not start a blog instead?! If you've got decent experience, why not share that. I'd be willing to bet that this will be the *best* advert for your skills because:

1. It's always updated (if you post often)
2. It's not like you're *looking* for work doing it - but your (future) employer, or their developers will check it out anyway to get a better insight into your character.
3. Putting something on your resume doesn't mean you can do it. I'm not saying that you'd lie about your skills :-), but there's no argument about your ability when you're writing articles about the stuff, getting comments and feedback, and better yet, learning *EVEN MORE* about your passions.

Best of all - you can run your blog from your chosen domain and also point to your resume that is stored in linkedIn. Just an idea...

That's my two pennys worth on that - hope it helps you come to a decision!