The right way to build a dynamic personal website for a physics student?

There is no single "right way". Instead, there are pros and cons to various solutions and your circumstances will value those pros/cons in a particular, personal way. This will make a few of those options be more suitable to your needs.

Other than that, you mention a few things which you should not really care about. E.g. a CDN or "deploying in the cloud" doesn't really make much sense at this stage. And no, you should not concern yourself about "webassembly" for this at all. Probably also, analytics.

In any case I think the main problem is that it's not really clear to me whether your main goal is to a. build the thing, b. use the thing, or c. both. But you should consider that a. will take quite a bit of effort and time, and it can easily end up taking away your willingness to do b. On the other hand, if your goal is b. then there are already many solutions available without building them yourself.

This reminds me of what Olia Lialina calls "Prof. Dr. Style", which is basically the opposite. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

Physics PhD who has been working in the software industry since here. I made my first web page with plain old HTML at my physics department and had a job in grad school making education content in Java applets.

You don”t need ‘dynamic’, a dynamic back end will cost a lot to run and be something that can screw up. You’re not doing anything really interactive and will want to add content at most once a week if thst.

Go Jamstack with a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican. Pick you favorite here

https://jamstack.org/generators/

Why do you want to build it yourself? If the goal is to learn something, then it is probably better to simply start experimenting and see how far you can get. Asking for generic advice on StackOverflow or Hacker News is probably not the best approach. You'd get many opinions, and it will take a lot of time to be able to evaluate those.

Making something like this will probably take hundreds of hours. If the goal is not to learn something, I doubt you would want to invest that amount of time. I can only suggest that it is much easier to use an existing solution, such as WordPress or SquareSpace.

The question is relatively long, so I thought It'd be more appropriate to post a link instead:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76846328/the-right-way-t...