A personal home page is definitely a great asset in the current web world. I stumbled upon this blog post by Jamie Millard while writing this post: 3 reasons why you should have a personal website. Here is the gist of it.

1. It makes life easier for your contacts.
2. It's easy and affordable!
3. It doesn't have to have bells and whistles

In a more professional context, here is another article that outlines how your homepage is important professionally : Job seekers: Should have personal website. Here is their take on this.

• A website is easy to build.
• It will help you get found.
• A blog can help you standout.
• A website is a great supplement to your resume.

If you like what you see on my page and have a github account, the short answer is,

1. fork my github repository (click the green ribbon on top of this page)
2. Rename the repository to yourusername.github.com
3. Do what ever you want with it ! (ofcourse as long as you take care of the license requirements)

Now for the long answer.. Personal home pages are usually static. (unless you are much into blogging and care for public comments on it, in which case there probably is some way to embed content from standard blogging websites). A simple static html page served my purpose. So, if you have basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, it is quite easy to build a simple webpage, either from scratch or from an existent template. You could copy my page for a start and modify it to your taste for example. Go to my github repository for a copy of these pages. If you do not intend to fiddle around with low level editing/coding, you should consider looking into some wysiwyg editors like the Adobe Dreamweaver. Checkout this page for a list of most popular wysiwyg HTML editors: Five Best WYSIWYG HTML Editors. If you require more fancy dynamic pages, you should look into server side scripting (like php or jsp) with SQL/database support. Here is a full length Harward video lecture series on Building Dynamic Websites.