Danielle M. Stevens
Building a website can be incredibly useful for personal brand development as well as providing an interface to communicate with the broader community. In the world of academia, the concept of building a personal website as a centralized medium to showcase who you are, work work, goals, etc. is only growing. But building a website is not always cheap and/or not always easy. If you're not particularly tech savvy, products such as Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, and others make this easier. But they come at a price. Static website hosted via github using Jekyll are great tools for cost. But require the user to become fairly familiar with the command line and frequently have the user learn some degree of html, css for customization.
This is where Notion, Fruition, Cloudflare, and Namecheap come in. It sounds like a lot. But it's simple and while not free, it can be pretty cheap depending on your domain name price. For reference, my website (at daniellemstevens.com) costs 14.95 a year. Not too bad.
To break it down, here's how they work together