Every member of the MSCS Department with an account on the server "math.uic.edu" has space for a website at the URL

http://www.math.uic.edu/~username

where "username" is the name you use to log into your math account (not your uic.edu NetID.) This provides you with a great opportunity to develop a personal website as a key part of your job search. Consider your website as a "dynamic curriculum vitae" which gets updated with additional information as it seems pertinent.

For example, on your web site you can feature a list of seminars you have given, or a complete list of the courses you have taught, and include as much as you care to about your duties in these courses. You can also include links to any preprints you have written, especially some paper you may finish after you have sent out your applications.

Your web site gets listed on the MathJobs.org site also, so that prospective employers are essentially encouraged to check it out.

This means that if you do maintain a personal web site, it must convey a professional appearance. if a member of the Search Committee considering your application sees that your web page is" All Goth, All the Time", well, they just might develop some hesitations to hire you to teach their innocent students. Whatever. Even if you don't list your web site on the MathJobs.org application site, the Committee members are likely to find it with a quick google search.

The same reasoning applies to any facebook or other such web location about yourself. The best advice is - sanitize! Clean out all these accounts until you are set up in a position for next year. In fact, you might google your own name to see what a member of the Search Committee considering your application might find themselves. Then, if there is anything you can do to clean up what you find - like removing your high school era web site depicting you doing some typical high school stuff - Do It. The web has great power to help you with your application process, and also power to hinder it.

The Mechanics of Creating a Website

Well, it is easy, and it is hard. The easy part is that all you need is an ascii (text) editor to write the webpages in html language, and a secure FTP client to move the text files up to the directory "~/public_html/" in your account main directory "math.uic.edu/~username" The hard part is that you have to know something about writing html documents to do it this simply.

Much easier is to use a "WYSIWYG" web editor - where you just type and the editor writes the appropriate code. The Cadillac such program is Dreamweaver for Mac and Windows. But this cost money - though students can buy it at steep discount via the AAAC - the price is $106. If you plan to do a lot of web development, this is the recommended tool of choice - at least for some of us.

There are also other web editors, which are free. Try googling "web editor mac" or "web editor windows".

For Mac: try this link to HTML Editors
For windows: try this link to HTML Editors.

But these are just two of many such sites. Ask around to find out what others use.

These HTML Editors usually have a secure FTP feature built into them. Otherwise, download an FTP client as well. For the Mac, there are several, including a personal favorite "Transmit". For Windows, the free software "PuTTY" serves this purpose.

After you have your HTML Editor and FTP client, you then can start working on your web page. The old adage was to find a page you copy, then download the source file using the "View Source" option on web browsers, which shows the underlying HTML code. This is still a good idea if the web page you like is designed using "standard code" - but many web sites these days use various server scripts to generate them, and may have enormous amounts of specialized JavaScripts embedded in them, which makes copying more difficult.

Perhaps best is to search the web for one of the zillions of web tutorials, and work through it; or buy a book on it, and work through it; or persuade through various devices a fellow grad student (or even perhaps a younger sibling still in High School or University) to show you how to do it.

Whatever - Just Do It.