I decided to host my website on Github. Github offers free hosting for static websites and is a common place for software developers to host their personal / portfolio websites.
Persona:
Decide who the users of this website will be. Develop two user personas of typical users who might come to your site.
Persona 1 - Recruiter (Biotech / Infotech)
Name: Lisa Simpson
Company: LSS Consultants
Education: Boston University
Years of Experience: 6
Recruiter Lisa Simpson works for a life-science technology and strategy consulting firm based in Boston, MA. Lisa grew up in a Boston suburb and attended Boston University as a Psychology and Communications double major. Directly after graduating from BU, Lisa moved to Los Angeles for a few years to pursue her MS in Psychology at UCLA. After working in a research position, she decided to move into recruiting back in Boston.
Lisa is a warm and friendly person, that is easy to talk to and looking to help out as much as possible to get candidates into their dream jobs. She may be a little overly optimistic and less concerned about the number of years of experience or specific skills required for jobs.
While searching to fill several roles for life science clients, Lisa stumbled across my website. Once on my website, Lisa is looking for specific skill sets and “buzzwords” that are a good match for companies she has been hired by. She is driven to find me a position because the primary deliverable for her work is finding top candidates. Lisa would really like the landing page of my website because you quickly gauge my experience and personality. She might not think that the website is as polished compared to a off-the-shell template from a website builder or if I was a professional designer.
Persona 2 - Hiring manager (Biotech / Infotech)
Name: Kevin Kennedy
Company: Buzzword Start-up
Education: MIT
Years of Experience: 8
Kevin is the hiring manager/CTO for a rapidly growing technology firm in Cambridge, MA. Previously Kevin was the technical co-founder at Hooli directly out of his undergraduate education in Computers Science at MIT. Kevin grew up in Palo Alto, CA with two parents that worked in the tech industry.
Buzzword just acquired $10MM is Series A funding and is looking to hire on experienced technology professionals that are able to take on multiple roles. Kevin is specifically looking for candidates with strong software engineering and data science skills that are also able to lead people and projects.
Kevin is a direct to business no fluff kind of guy. He is very discerning and asks very technical questions. He is looking for people with strong general problem solving and quantitative reasoning abilities. However, based on feedback from peer’s, he is also looking for someone with good people skills to offset his sometimes to serious personality.
A mutual professional connection gave my contact information and website link to. Kevin was told I had the technical background and people skills he was looking for and he takes personal references very seriously as it can save him lots of time in the vetting process. While on the website, Kevin is looking for a specific level of engineering experience and a career path with progressive levels of responsibility and complexity of work. Kevin wouldn’t care as much about the ascetics of the website as he would about the informational content and the companies I have worked for in the past. Furthermore, my personal interests section would give him a better idea if I would be a good cultural fit for his company.
Create an overall (logical/organized) information architecture. Explain your choices.
The primary goal for the landing page is to present all the pertinent information about my experience, skills, and personality so a recruiter or hiring manager can quickly scan the main page and hopefully develop a positive first impression. The navigation bar is fixed to the header, so when the user scrolls, if they are interested and want to learn more they can go the blog, projects, or resume pages.
Landing Page Sections:
Main Banner
About Me
Interests
Contact Me
Projects Index Page
The projects index page is useful to allowing visitors to explore my experience in more detail by reviewing the different types of projects and industries I have worked in.
Area to elaborate on the specific projects listed on the index page.
Easily access the blog posts for this course (and future blog posts).
Need a separate page for long blog posts, which can include images and gifs.
Include PDF resume in an easily accessible place for employers who are interested in pursuing my application further.
I would like the users/visitors on my site to view me as a professional in the fields of biotech and infotech with both technical and managerial skill sets. Between my educational background and professional experience, I am to provide consulting knowledge the help serve the needs of the client.
My goal is that this website will help me to obtain part time consulting projects in the fields of software engineering, process engineering, project management and business strategy.
From visiting my website, the brand I am to provide is not only someone that is dependable on deliverables but also someone that fits company culture and easy to work with.
The actual website looks/feels (linking your design choices here to the first three items above (personae, flow, brand)
Since I am interested in moving into a software engineering or data science role, I researched personal websites and portfolios for software developers. I came across this blog post A Software Engineer’s One-Page Portfolio the described what employers are looking for when reviewing engineer portfolios. The author included the source code for his example site http://chuckgroom.com/onepage-bio.
However, since I am not a senior software engineer, I needed to make some modifications to the author’s original design. Mainly adding sections for my portfolio, blog, and resume.
Comments were added to the static website via Disqus, which is a global comment system that improves discussion on websites and connects conversations across the web. Disqus offers the ability to automate directing new comments directly to your email as well as allowing to response via email and have the replies show up in the comment thread. This type of automation is important to me because it will allow me to receive real time communication from recruiters and promptly respond to their messages through email on my laptop or my cell-phone if I am traveling and do not have access to a computer.