As an academic, having an online presence gives you a big leg up. Some of the key functions are:
collect your papers together for easy perusal
show who your advisor and advisees are (this helps editors know if you have a conflict of interest as a potential reviewer)
picture (people want to recognize you at events)
email address (so that your colleagues can reach you)
If you are a PhD student, and you have at least one paper online, then you should make your own website right now.
My first website was made using Academic Pages. It worked well enough, until one day in 2023 Jekyll started screaming and stopped compiling. Since then I have been writing html by hand. Starting today, I want to try something new. I rebuilt my website using Frankin. Its another static website generator, with easy support for LaTeX and code highlighting. I host my website through GitHub Pages, linked to my own domain name.
With the new Franklin tech, I want to start blogging. They say its good to practice your writing frequently. The first few posts will be information that I have tweeted before. Putting that into more a more archive-friendly and longer form format will be my first step towards making it into something useful.
At least, I think I will. Depends on how well this Github Pages deployment with the new tech will go lmaosob