In the last few days, I have spent some time creating my online resume. I have owned my name domain name for quite some time, with that intention, but have never actually gone about doing it. So, I took it upon myself to remedy that situation. The result can be seen at ShaneEde.com.
In doing this, there were several ways that I felt I could use to create a site that would work. Aside from basic HTML coding, the only thing that didn’t seem like an enormous overkill was to build the online resume with WordPress as the code base. Because of this and other blogs, I am very familiar with it and have used it on several occasions as a CMS to create static sites. The actual install is very basic. There are only a few plugins and the theme is a basic free one from the WordPress.org theme gallery.
Plugins used (as of this post):
- Akismet (This should just be on by default)
- All in One SEO Pack
- Contact Form 7
- Flickr Widget
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Google Analyticator
- Official Statcounter Plugin
- WP-DBManager
With the exception of the Flickr Widget, most of those are either semi-necessary or I deemed them to be relevant and useful.
The information proved to be a bit more difficult to come up with. My main issue began when I realized that your traditional resume is generally one page and merely hits the highlights. I wanted my online resume to do have much more information than that. Which meant I couldn’t just copy and paste the contents of my traditional resume. Once I had that down, typing it in was easy enough.
The information may be the most important part of the whole thing, but it becomes quite cumbersome and rote if it doesn’t have a structure that lends itself to easy browsing. I managed to stumble upon a great resource (from which I borrowed many ideas) in Jon DiPietro’s online resume. Jon’s resume fulfills a bit different purpose than mine does in that he is much further along in his career than I. He wrote a very good piece on another of his blogs on Creating a Compelling Resume Online with WordPress that became the rough outline for what I was trying to accomplish.
Having completed the site, I must admit that it was one of the easier sites I’ve ever built. It’s entirely static pages that are easy to update and change. The structure could be easily changed or added on to and if I decided at some point to begin posting semi-regular blog posts, that could be arranged as well. For the moment, it will stay as a static website. It’s still an infant as far as websites go, however, so there are likely to be a few fine tunings in it’s near future.
Now, please go check out ShaneEde.com and let me know what you think. There’s a contact form there if you like, or you can come back here and leave a comment.
About Shane Ede
Very cool. Kind of what I’m looking to do, too! Thanks for some great ideas. (The offer to help still stands, though it doesn’t look like you need much!)