Your scholarly work shouldn’t live in someone else’s database. A portfolio website that you own and control is different. It moves with you between institutions, costs nothing to maintain, and presents your work the way you want it seen.
A well-designed portfolio showcases your research, teaching, and projects in ways that a CV alone cannot. Publications, syllabi, digital projects, media appearances—a portfolio site gives all of that a permanent, public home so you and your ideas remain visible.
Our portfolio sites run on GitHub Pages—free, open, and built on web standards that have been around for decades. No subscription fees, no ads, no proprietary lock-in. What you build today will still work years from now with zero upkeep. Your site is just text files in a repository that belongs to you.
Building a portfolio teaches you a lot about communication: how to highlight what’s most important, how styling shapes design, how to match tone to audience, how to balance different facets of your public identity. You also learn how to organize and structure information for digtial display. Understanding how digital projects work is increasingly essential in every field, and the confidence that comes from building something real is invaluable.
Xanthan is designed so that AI assistants can read and modify it precisely. The file structure is flat, the configuration is plain-text front matter, and the conventions are consistent — which means you can describe what you want in ordinary language and let the AI handle the code.
In practice, this starts simple: “make the header taller,” “add a section about my teaching,” “change the accent color to forest green.” The AI finds the right file, makes the change, explains what it did. As you get comfortable, the tasks get more complex: adding a new page type, wiring up a custom layout, pulling in a new data source. The same conversation, just higher stakes.
We work with you through that progression — helping you build the habit of directing an AI assistant through real technical decisions, so the confidence you gain here transfers to your research, writing, and any future project that touches code.
Check out the Xanthan portfolio demo site to get a sense of the basic template.
Head over to the Xanthan getting started guide to for step by step directions to have your site running (with placeholder content) in 10 minutes. Then the fun part of making it yours!