If you’re a graduate or postgraduate student, you need a web space and email address that are independent of an institution—somewhere you can upload your publications, link to achievements, and supply contact information. Your target audience includes employers, potential collaborators, future students, funding agencies, and the media. I think the following are all important considerations:

• Your web identity has to be portable, so the address stays the same as you change institutions.
• It should use open standards such as HTML that aren’t going away soon, rather than proprietary formats that might go bust (like some ePortfolio companies) or change their terms and conditions tomorrow (like Facebook).
• If there’s a learning curve involved in creating that web space, the skills you gain should stay as useful as possible in the future.
• It should be simple enough for you to keep up-to-date, but should still allow you to demonstrate you have some internet savvy.
• It should be more than an online résumé; you should be able to showcase your actual skills and professional experience by linking to them or putting them on the page.
• And it should be your first result on Google.

To do this, I recommend the following steps.

1. Get a web-based independent email address
2. Register a domain name
3. Arrange some server space from a web host and point the domain name at it
4. Set up some email addresses, forwarding them to your main address
5. Create a simple blog as a basic website
6. Make your photos available online
7. Make your work accessible under a Creative Commons license

I’ll be blogging each of these steps as I run workshops and create handout for them.