How to Make and Use a Website to Get a Job

The best resume in the world won't do you a lick of good if it goes unseen.

Of course, you could copy your resume onto reams of sturdy resume stock paper, then mail out the copies. But then you'd be spending upwards of $50 per ream of quality paper, up to $100 on envelopes and more than $75 in postage.

Obviously, cost is one of the reasons resumes are being sent electronic.

The main problem with sending your resume electronically, though, is the same reason it's come into vogue: the attachment. Some companies have their servers set to strip attachments from emails coming from the outside. But if you only send your resume in the body of the email, you lose the pretty formatting.

The solution, then, is to turn your resume into a simple web page. By "simple," of course, I mean "not difficult" AND "not complex."

Let's assume you have your resume in Microsoft Word. If you use a different word processor (OpenOffice.org, Works, WordPerfect, etc.), the principles are pretty much the same.

Presto! Now it's a web page! Open your resume. Go to "file," then "save as." Rename your file "index." Then click on "Save as type." Choose "web page (*.htm; *.html)." Now, instead of being saved in the default ".doc" format, it will be saved as a web page.

Get a free web site. Yahoo! offers free web space (through geocities), although their free version is ad-supported. Hey - you've got to give a little to get a little. The web builder tools are useful if you want to get fancy, but for a simple resume site, simply go to the upload manager. Upload your resume (now named "index.html"). Preview your resume. It should look very much like it does in your word processing program.

Tell the world about your resume. Copy your web address. Heck, I encourage you to bookmark it. Now that you have a simple web site, you can paste the link in your emails to employers, recruiters and networking contacts. Put it on your resumes, business cards and everything else you might give a prospective employer.