A successful and well-run site can absolutely go on your resume, and it shows future employers or business connections that you’ve got ambition, talent, and drive. But building and hosting a legit-looking website costs money.
That’s why we’ve got a list of 5 inexpensive, low-investment website ideas to build with a bowl of ramen steaming on your dorm room desk.
1. Personal Blog
A personal blog is the perfect spot to share your unique view of the world with a bigger community than the one you’ll find on campus.
But it’s more than just a creative outlet. A personal blog helps you put the skills you’re learning in your classes to good use. You’ll need to write copy, do research, tell stories, and design a website. These are all excellent skills to refine with a personal blog!
Professionally, a strong personal blog is something you can regularly link to on social media. That includes LinkedIn, the gold mine of career opportunities. If you really put some elbow grease into it, you might even be able to make money with your personal blog.
One of my favorite blogs is The Blonde Abroad.
This blog has a very specific target audience: solo female travelers. And it pulls in plenty of traffic, too—over 170k visits in December 2024 alone.
The blog began with the author, Kiki, ditched her corporate finance job and all the typical expectations assigned to women and started traveling around the world by herself.
You’ll find all the details about those travels on The Blonde Abroad. The web design is friendly but uncomplicated—something you could easily design with WordPress. Little postcard-shaped tidbits draw you in to The Blonde Abroad’s top posts.
Um, yes I do want to see what rotten thing you ate, Kiki. (It was an Icelandic delicacy called kæstur hákarl. If you know, you know.) And yes I would like to learn more about a hotel where giraffes routinely greet you at your door.
Along with these more thrilling and fascinating types of posts, The Blonde Abroad offers resources for safe solo travel, top destinations for different travel goals, and tips for seeing the world on a budget.
Does this mean you, a college student, must ditch your studies and start flying around the world?
No! (Although if you do get a chance to travel while you’re young, I highly recommend it.)
You don’t have to write about travel at all. In fact, you should write about something that’s interesting to you. Something you are passionate about.
Here are a few tips to get you going.
How to get started with a personal blog:
- Pick a platform: Use free or affordable platforms like WordPress.com, Blogger, or Wix to set up your blog without making your wallet cry.
- Define your niche: Focus on something you’re passionate about, like student life abroad, fashion, sports, or even local adventures in your college town.
- Start simple: Choose an uncluttered theme and write content that resonates with your audience. Use a free keyword tool like Ahrefs Keyword Generator to find topics people are searching for. Avoid overloading the web design with unnecessary bells and whistles.
- Share consistently: Consistency is queen when we’re talking about building a blog audience. Even short updates or quick tips can maintain momentum. Just don’t get all excited, publish a bunch of blogs, and stop posting within weeks after a major blogger burnout. Instead, get all excited, write a bunch of blogs, and publish 1-2 a month instead of all at once. Give yourself a little breather and then write some more. Pace yourself, and you’ll stay motivated.
- Promote on social media: Use platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and X (RIP Twitter).
2. Portfolio Website
If you’re studying the humanities, there’s a good chance you’re an artist of some kind. Whether you’re a budding writer, visual artist, actor, graphic designer, filmmaker, or music performer, there’s an even better chance you have created tangible works of art. Same goes if you’re a web designer, coder, game designer, and probably much, much more.
A portfolio website is just the place to showcase that work. And trust me: you’ll be linking to that website a lot as you carve a spot for yourself in the world. I was an English major as an undergrad, and I really would’ve benefitted from building a simple portfolio of my best papers and publishing them on a website.
Obviously, not all of my essays were amazing—but one of them got accepted for presentation at a Sigma Tau Delta conference in Savannah, Georgia. My school’s English department funded my trip to the conference to present it—a fun, deliciously professional, and slightly terrifying experience for a 20-year-old.
Later, two of my nonfiction essays got published in small, super-niche magazines when I submitted them as part of a class I was taking.
These were early seeds of my eventual freelance career. I have a portfolio now, and potential freelance clients almost always ask to see it when I reach out to apply for a gig. And if they don’t ask, I share it anyway—or at least my best pieces from the portfolio. How else would they know if we’re a good fit?
I only wish I’d started a portfolio sooner. Unlike me, you can get ahead of the game with a portfolio website right now, while you’re still a student.
One of the best things about this type of site is it doesn’t take all that much work to maintain after you set it up. The goal of the site is to let the pieces in your portfolio do the talking.
Take Lauren Hom’s portfolio website, for example. When you visit Hom Sweet Hom, you’ll first see a photo of the designer and lettering artist, along with a quick intro.
Scroll down a bit more and you’ll see an impressive list of brands Hom has worked with—Target, Google, Adobe, and Starbucks among them—and then the portfolio begins.
The images are captivating, and each one links to a page that tells you a little more about the piece.
See that Target gift card design? Hom used powdered sugar to create the unique design. And the Squeeze the Day journal was inspired by memories of Hom’s cheerful grandmother.
But Hom also includes personal work in the portfolio, like the mural painted in Hom’s studio. And the trippy flour power piece.
If you look a little closer, Hom even hints at the role the internet played in helping land big gigs right out of school.
Maybe an early online portfolio had something to do with this?
Here’s what to keep in mind as you design your portfolio website.
How to get started with a portfolio website:
- Pick the right platform: Website builders like Webflow, Wix, or Squarespace are great for clean, simple, user-friendly portfolio websites. These also automatically make a mobile-responsive version of your site for people viewing it on their phones.
- Curate your best work: Avoid clogging your portfolio with everything you’ve ever worked on. Instead, showcase projects that really make your skills shine. Play around with information to pair with each piece. A little bit of context goes a long way, but don’t worry about writing paragraphs upon paragraphs to explain the work. Again, let it speak for itself.
- Include an about section: Add an ‘About Me’ section to share your story. Why do you create art (or website designs, or costumes, or video games, or whatever cool thing it is you do)? What do you hope website visitors will take away from your portfolio? Include contact information so potential colleagues, peers, or even clients can easily get in touch.
3. Resume or CV Website
Everyone needs a resume or curriculum vitae (CV) at some point in their life. But if you plan to work in a field that doesn’t exactly lend itself to portfolio creation, like finance, education, law, healthcare, or business management, a resume or CV website can be a stand-in for a portfolio, in a sense. It can help you stand out.
Or, you can make a website that houses both your portfolio and a CV/resume.
The key is to make your resume website polished, professional, and easy to absorb. Student and developer Diogo Correia’s site is a great example of this.
The homepage is simple, with alluring constellations that dance and flicker on the page. There’s a small photo of Correia, a very short bio, and a few buttons on a simple menu.
If you click on the CV button, you’ll see Correia’s impressive list of accomplishments. There’s all sorts of stuff on there, from Correia’s education and awards to his top programming skills and work experience.
Ready to create your own CV or resume-focused website? Here’s what to remember.
How to get started with a CV/resume website:
- Choose a minimalist theme: Balance out the dense information in your portfolio with a clean, minimalist theme using a website builder like Squarespace or Wix.
- Get a personal domain: Use your name for the domain to give your site a professional edge.
- Highlight key sections: Include your work experience, awards, education, skills, and links to portfolios or LinkedIn.
- Add interactivity: Integrate a contact form (easy to do with most website builders!) or downloadable resume option so potential employers can save your resume.
- Remember SEO: Use relevant keywords to help employers or collaborators find your site online. As a plus, employers’ applicant tracking systems (ATS) rely on keywords to help sort through all the resumes they get during a job application, so including keywords can get you seen faster.
4. Online Tutoring or Study Resources Site
What would we do without online tutoring and study resources websites?
Take Khan Academy, for example. Khan Academy is one of the most well-known online study sites in the world. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit has over 8.7 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and more than 2 billion total views.
The videos and lessons on the website cover everything from preschool education to MCAT (medical school), LSAT (law school), and SAT (college readiness) prep. No subject is untouched on Khan Academy, from math and science to the arts, life skills, economics, and computing.
And it all started with a young man named Salman Khan and his efforts to guide his cousins through thorny school assignments. He lived in one state and they lived in another, which gave him the idea to create an online tutoring website. This was several years before remote anything was as easy as it is today, so the site quickly gained traction.
If you love helping other students work through tricky subjects, consider starting your own tutoring website. You definitely don’t have to have Khan Academy-level dreams: these days, the site is a full-fledged educational tool stocked with content created by experts in pedagogy to align with state and national grade-level standards.
No one expects you to do that. But a small, focused tutoring website can help you gain important skills. Like building a website, using SEO to attract traffic, creating educational videos and tutorials, and responding to feedback.
All while showcasing your deep knowledge in a subject (or two).
If you happen to be going into any sort of field where you’ll be instructing or managing other people, a well-built online tutoring website is a gem on your resume.
How to get started with an online tutoring or study resources website:
- Define your niche: Focus on one specific subject, like algebra or essay writing. Pick something you’re good at and passionate about. Later, you can add new subjects as your audience grows.
- Create content: Use tools like Loom to record video tutorials or Google Docs for printable resources. Make sure the materials are straightforward, free of grammatical errors, and easy to understand.
- Build your site: Use free platforms like WordPress.com or Wix to create a website.
- Promote your resources: Share your site on student forums or spread the word with social media. Tell your friends about it, too! If you regularly get asked to help friends write their papers, for example, you could start pointing them in the direction of your website, where you’ve conveniently uploaded a 5-minute video that offers an easy formula for writing epic essays on the first try.
- Nurture your audience: Use quizzes and games to help keep your web visitors learning—and having fun while they’re at it. Tools like Kahoot! and Google Forms can help you with this part. Leave the comments section open under your videos so learners can leave questions and feedback for you. Staying engaged and respectful in the comments section goes a long way toward building your reputation as an instructor and leader.
5. E-Commerce Store for Custom Creations
Do you love creating things with your hands? Do you also have a stack of said things in your dorm room that you’re not sure what to do with?
Why not try to make a little money on the side with an e-commerce store?
When I was in college, I knew plenty of peers who could’ve pulled this off. During my senior year, I took a book-making class for an elective. I thought it would be about making cool journals to write in, or something.
But it was not. Instead, I found myself in a bona fide, 400-level art class. I was surrounded by incredibly talented art students who could whip up amazing, X-acto-knife-sculpted, intricately glued, vibrantly illustrated, meticulously collaged, and delicately mosaiced handmade books.
Each one of their creations could have sold for at least fifty dollars, if not more. Kinda like this little piece of art on Etsy, sold by FoldAfterFold.
(Yes, that’s an old book with the pages folded to look like a bookshelf with tiny books on it. This piece of art would definitely have earned its maker an A+ in that bookmaking class.)
My books, on the other hand, were clumsy scrapbooks speckled with literal blood, sweat, and tears from the hours I spent hunched over my kitchen table with unfamiliar supplies sprawled around me.
I once even had a full-fledged breakdown in the middle of class, tears and all. Not a highlight of my college experience, that’s for sure.
But I scraped by with a good grade, thanks to a gracious professor, and tremendous respect for people who create magical things with their hands.
If you’re one of them and you like the idea of using your talent to build a side gig, it’s time to build an e-commerce storefront for your custom creations.
How to get started with an e-commerce store for custom creations:
- Pick a platform: If you want a storefront or website you can make your own, Shopify is ideal, but you have to bring in your own traffic and pay a small(ish) monthly fee to use it. Etsy is free to use and has a built-in audience, but there’s less customizability. And both storefronts do take a percentage of your sales. Learn the ins and outs of both platforms before you make a decision!
- Focus on a niche: Whatever you do, don’t get stuck building an online store around something you hate but think will make money. Instead, focus on something you enjoy doing—and can enjoy doing over and over and over again as people start buying from your shop. It could be anything from making scarves or earrings to printing designs on shirts or creating soaps and candles.
- Promote your store: Use social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to show everyone your products. Share behind-the-scenes content and other insights into your journey as a student seller to connect with your followers, and engage with them in the comments section.
- Start small: Get going with a small, manageable inventory and really pour your focus into making high-quality items. You can always scale once you’re done with your studies.
Make customers happy: Provide great service and fast responses, and encourage happy customers to leave reviews. Build that social proof and your customer base will grow, slowly but surely!
