Three ways to build your Portfolio.


While there are plenty of tools to create a portfolio, you can develop your own.

I always thought that creating a portfolio it’s a difficult task and with a difficult task I tend to procrastinate, but this is another topic that I might tackle in a future article. Nevertheless, in time I learned that breaking difficult tasks into small steps will be easier to accomplish.

In this week’s article, I will give you three tools based on my experience to create your portfolio.

Why do you need a portfolio?

Nowadays a portfolio is more like a resume, for quite lots of companies it is imperative when you want to be hired, to present a portfolio. If you are interested in only what I used, and are in a hurry, you can skip reading the article and go at the end of it and see just the resources.

Hi, I am Luc, a web developer that struggles to beat his own results. 

WordPress

While this option is at hand, fast, pre-built, and easy to use up to a certain point, it brings a certain limitation as of what you can do and what you can not do with your portfolio, that is unless of course, you don’t have a particular theme installed.

You can use plug-ins that will help you to ease your work and gain time. But in a long run, you will encounter difficulties and your website will diminish speed and performance. I did my best to improve my WordPress website, but Lighthouse from Google always gave me under 70%, I hope you can do better than this and you’ll share the results. 

Customised portfolio

If you ask me, I would go with this option as you can build it from scratch. You can just let your imagination flow and you can always insert new things and implement whatever you are learning whenever you want.

The downside of this option is that it requires plenty of time to do it, and if you are like me that need jobs to bring food to the table then this option it’s not the best.

But, if you are willing to learn and give time then you can opt-in for this way of building your portfolio. 

Customised Theme

One of the first portfolios I created was a customized simple one-page website theme hosted on GitHub. The second one it’s also hosted on GitHub.

This option is the best that I found at the moment.

A customized theme is a free downloaded theme into your local machine and customized at your taste. 

The positive side of this option is that you see someone else’s code, you learn how to implement your code, you have access 100% to modify the content, you save time, and you learn by practicing. 

One of the downsides is that you need to have at least a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to modify the theme itself. If you don’t know where to start I wrote an article about my path that could help you, you can check it out here. 

Conclusion

Build with the tool you feel more comfortable and it’s easy for you to get the thing done.

I prefer the customized theme as this is a way for me to improve my own knowledge of programming and as well to practice what I have already learned. 

Use the right tools according to your portfolio project, what I mean by this is to not try to reinvent the wheel and keep things simple.

Keep in mind that there is no easy path to learn, so if the time allows you, build your portfolio from scratch.

Resources:

That’s it for this week, wishing you a productive week ahead, I hope you find this article helpful.

  • For WordPress, I use The Divi Theme. You can have a look here to see how it is. This link goes to my WordPress version portfolio built with Divi.
  • For a Customised Portfolio that you want to build from scratch, I don’t have a certain link, but you can find inspiration on these sites: Behance and Dribble
  • Customised Theme:
  • For my first theme portfolio, I used a Bootstrap Theme you can see here and my customised portfolio is here
  • The second one I used is also a pre-made theme I downloaded and then customised it almost 90% and you can see various themes here. My actual Portfolio is hosted on GitHub and you can see the result here.

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