Why Create a Professional Online Resume with WordPress

I'm sure you have a resume, we all do. It might be on paper, a USB stick or in the cloud but you'll have one. You probably uploaded it onto a number of online job sites and have a digital version ready to email to employers. One thing you might be missing is an online version that you control 100%. You can get complete control over the look of your own Resume if you use WordPress to build and updating and amending it is simply a case of a few clicks and a little typing.

Benefits of an Online Resume

It's only natural for you to want your Resume to look nice, after all the nicer and more eye-catching it is the more likely the employer is to notice you.

When you have your Resume online you have the luxury of being able to make it look exactly how you want it. You can emphasize your main skills by making them bold, change their color etc. Any way you want it to look is possible if you know a little HTML or CSS code and there are plenty of pre-made themes tailored specifically for resumes if you don't know HTML.

You can even get traffic to the site hosting it by and get more exposure by blogging.

Getting Started Building Your Professional Online Resume

The first thing you need is a domain to host your site on, if you don't already own one, then you need hosting. If you don't want to shell out any cash you can get a free .tk domain and free hosting. The quality of the domains and hosting will be nowhere near the quality you will get with paid versions but if you don't have the spare cash then free is your only choice.

After you set up a domain and hosting you need to install WordPress on it. I won't go through that today but if you want to know how to install WordPress leave me a comment and I'll be happy to help. You could also check out the guides written by Garrett Love about building a complete website.

Once you've got WordPress installed you are free to go ahead and create a page for your Resume. Start with your name and contact details at the top, maybe include a photo of you if you want, and then get filling in your skills. You can do all this within the default WordPress Page editor or you can install a plugin named WP Resume to handle any of the complicated formatting for you.

Make Your Resume Look Nice

When it comes to setting things up nice the best thing you can do is to choose a good WordPress Theme. There are literally thousands of free themes and lots of paid premium themes available.

Using things like headers, lists, bold, underline and italics you can format a page to look how you like and draw attention to specific places you want to highlight.

Call to Action

The super cool thing about hosting your own Resume online is that you can include some things in it that you can't put on a printed version. Intractable objects like links or buttons and options inviting them to contact you directly from the site -  a Call to Action if you will.

A Call to Action is a big thing in marketing. With your Resume you are marketing yourself as the brand and as such you should include some CTAs throughout your online Resume. Invite someone to ask you to give a quote for some work they need done. Get them to contact you if they have any questions you could answer and maybe even think about writing a blog post answering questions and get people who are asking those questions to your site, maybe they will then ask you to do the job for them.

Another benefit of using WordPress to host an online Resume is that you can do all that and generate traffic to your site that might then be interested in employing you.

In Conclusion

Having a Resume online makes you find-able. Employers can find you. If you host it yourself rather than in an online resume database then you can make it look how you want and accept communications directly from it or direct people to your social networking profiles if you want. You can also generate traffic to your site if you answer questions and that in turn will get more exposure to your Resume.

There is no reason why having your own Online Resume made with WordPress could be a bad thing but there are many reasons why it could be a good thing. Later in the week I'll be uploading the full guide of how to build your complete online resume with WordPress. Using WordPress to host your Resume is a brilliant use for it but there are other ways to use WordPress as well including building an online store.