Inside 500 Real Career Websites: What Professionals Choose to Show

What do people publish when they control their professional story? We studied 500 real websites made with Self. The answer is reassuringly practical: people want their experience to be easy to understand, their personality to be visible, and the next conversation to be one click or call away.

The sites are recognizably CV-shaped, but they are not simply PDFs placed online. Their owners make deliberate choices about introductions, photographs, contact details, links, and design. Together, those choices show how a personal career website is becoming a trusted professional home rather than a backup copy of LinkedIn.

The essentials still earn their place

Experience, education, and skills appear on almost every site because they let a visitor answer the basic questions quickly. That familiarity is a strength. A hiring manager does not have to learn a new interface before learning about the person.

The more personal layer begins just below those essentials. Three hundred and sixty-five websites include what CV tools often call a summary: the short introduction that may also be described as an About section, profile, brief biography, or professional overview. Whatever the label, its job is the same: explain who you are, the work you are good at, and where you are heading.

A useful introduction is shorter than a biography

At 59 words, the typical introduction is long enough to communicate a specialty and point of view, but short enough to read before scrolling. A useful test is whether the opening could belong to anybody else. If it could, replace one generic adjective with a specific field, audience, problem, or ambition.

The typical website lists four roles and 24 skills. That gives readers useful breadth, but it also creates a challenge: a long skill list is only persuasive when the experience, projects, or results underneath it make the important claims believable. The website works best as a guided story, not an inventory.

People trust Self with the route to a real conversation

The standout number is 85%: more than eight in ten people chose to publish a phone number. Alongside the 94% who shared an email address, that signals strong confidence in Self as the public page that represents them. These are not disposable profiles. Their owners rely on them to support genuine professional contact.

Self also lets each person decide what to reveal. A public phone number is optional, and anyone who prefers more separation can use an email address or other professional route. Trust is valuable precisely because control remains with the page owner.

Only 47% linked to LinkedIn. That is positive evidence for a broader change: a professional identity no longer has to live entirely inside a social platform. Many people are comfortable using a space such as Self as their primary public introduction, with LinkedIn as an optional supporting link rather than the destination.

GitHub appeared on 11% of websites. We cannot turn that into an exact count of programmers because many developers do not publish GitHub and some non-developers use it. It does show that Self's audience is much broader than software careers. Most people in the sample communicated their value through experience, education, results, and other forms of work.

Minimal design is the clear favorite

Minimalistic, Self's flagship free template, was selected by 345 of the 500 people. Availability matters, but the scale of the preference still says something useful: professionals consistently gravitate toward calm layouts, clear type, generous space, and understated visual confidence.

The rest of the choices reinforce rather than contradict that result. Charcoal, Bento, and Aurora give people different moods, from dark restraint to modular or abstract aesthetics, while keeping the career story readable. People want personality, but they rarely want decoration to compete with their work.

The biggest opportunity is visible proof

Only 170 websites included projects, even though projects are one of the clearest advantages a website has over a conventional CV. They can show the decisions, artifacts, and outcomes behind a skill. Publications, talks, campaigns, case studies, and repositories can do the same for different kinds of careers.

• Open with a 50-80 word introduction that names your field, strengths, and direction.
• Keep the familiar foundation of experience, education, and a focused set of skills.
• Add one or two projects, results, or work samples that make your strongest claims tangible.
• Choose the contact route you genuinely want employers, clients, or collaborators to use.
• Select a visual style that feels like you while keeping the work effortless to scan.

Self is built around exactly that balance: a familiar professional structure, templates shaped by experienced designers, and enough flexibility to make the result personal. Our step-by-step career website guide can help you choose the story, and Self can turn your existing CV into an editable website without asking you to design one from scratch.

What these websites tell us

The strongest signal is not that every professional makes the same choices. It is that people trust a personal website to carry real professional weight. They publish direct contact details, choose a design that represents them, and increasingly treat third-party profiles as optional additions. The next step is not more information. It is using the space Self provides to connect a clear career story with convincing proof.

This study describes 500 real websites published with Self. It shows what people chose to publish, not which choice caused interviews or offers.

Research note: read the shared methodology and limitations for the sample, counting rules, and privacy approach used across all three studies.