How did building your own website go?
I made my website using a simple RMarkdown site. Since I intend this website to be a professional website, I added pages about my research interests, teaching experiences, and working experiences. The biggest surprise I had during the website process was that changes to the website were not immediately visible after committing and pushing them to the repository. I refreshed my website multiple times, and the changes eventually appeared. It turned out that a GitHub action needed to run in order for the changes to be visible, and this took a few moments after each commit. In retrospect, this makes sense, but it was surprising for me after I added the first additional page to my website.
For me, the most time-consuming part of the process was choosing the theme for my website since RMarkdown includes multiple themes for HTML documents. I started out changing the theme in the _site.yml file, committing and pushing to the repository, and waiting for the changes to be applied so I could see if I liked how the theme looked. I later figured out that I could change the theme in the _site.yml file and then locally knit one of the RMarkdown documents to see what the resulting webpage would look like. This sped things up, and I settled on the cerulean theme because I liked that it incorporated color, unlike most of the other themes.
Here is a link to my website: hardtme.github.io.