Your Guide to Building a Web Developer Portfolio
What should a portfolio for a Web Developer include? Which tools to use for creating one? Any resources? Lastly, is a portfolio even useful for a web developer job?
Let’s talk about it.
Your Web Dev portfolio is a kind of a resume which does two things:-
- It is a project in itself that you can put on your resume.
- It showcases your web development skills.
Parts of the Portfolio
This can actually be subjective as many people will have different opinions as to what can be included in a portfolio but I think it should only contain the most relevant things such as:
- Hero section having your name/image, resume
- Work Experience
- Projects
- Information about you
- Education
- Contact information such as social links, email
- Miscellaneous
The above points is a broad overview of what can be included but you can explore these. Education might be irrelevant if you are an experienced web developer.
Miscellaneous can include a section where if you have more of your work such as blogs, you can display them over there.
And various other web elements such as top bar (header) and a footer can be included, it depends on you.
Similarly, many more ideas can develop over what to include on a portfolio.
Do NOT forget these
When you build your shiny piece of work, there are some things that you need to keep in mind.
Your portfolio should be working. No brainer, right?
Make sure that whatever is in your portfolio, such as links and buttons, should be working. They should not go to a page with a 404 error.
Your portfolio should be responsive.
It should not be a situation where your website works flawlessly on desktop screen but its layouts and components go off the viewport on mobile screens. I think, most developers fail to do this.
Tools to create a Web Developer Portfolio
Here, you have multiple choices.
Tech to build it
You can choose simplicity by building your portfolio with HTML, CSS and JavaScript alone.
I personally used React and Tailwind CSS for creating my portfolio. One thing I don’t have is that there are no pages. There’s only a home page.
If I had multiple pages, I would have chosen Next.js by default as I like their routing system. Moreover, it would be good for SEO.
Hosting
Lastly, you would need to host it somewhere. It is generally advised to buy a domain and host it on the web with sites like Hostinger, GoDaddy, etc. as this brings some authenticity to your work.
But if you are a beginner or just trying out, you can host your portfolio for free on Vercel, Netlify, Render, and many more.
There’s a plethora of technologies that you can choose to build your portfolio. Only thing you have to do is get the fundamentals right, i.e., your website should be working and be responsive.
Is a web developer portfolio even helpful?
This is subjective.
If you are a freelancer web developer, your portfolio can be everything for you as the client will analyze your work on the basis of it. Hence it is essential to build one.
But if you want a full time job, there’s a bit of uncertainty.
Because I think many of the recruiters just look at the resume and your projects.
Nevertheless, you SHOULD build a web developer portfolio as you can show your achievements and present yourself in a better way (more than just a text based resume). Plus, it can be very creative.
Top Resources
Use these multiple links to explore stuff about a web developer portfolio.
