Why you need a portfolio website

Of course you can get a job without a personal website. No company will ask you to present one. But 1) having a personal portfolio website can never be a disadvantage and 2), presenting your skills, experience and portfolio as a dev is not only for “getting a job”.

Reasons for a personal website:
A portfolio website can visualize information better than a CV - you can use animations, hover effects and link to deeper content and projects.
Be visible in the tech community and give others an opportunity to contact you. Expanding your network has many benefits, either be it sharing knowledge with others or coming across new job opportunities.
Promote yourself as a freelancer and win clients. Even if you work full time for a company, you might consider freelancing one day. Having a list of leads for that will ease your start a lot.
Creating a website with the tech you love is fun! View your website as a playground for cool new tech you discover.

Lessons learned from my own portfolio website

Based on my 20 years of experience in tech, dozens of hiring decisions I have made and combined with my own personal career experiences, I would like to share these takeaways with you.

Be yourself

Always be yourself and do not try to be someone else. Write an About me section where you describe who you are as a professional. Include your current job title because it helps to quickly let the reader grasp your level of professional experience. But also focus on aspects that define you as a person to make readers feel like they understand who you are. That will grab their attention right away. Try to be on point here and keep it brief you will have plenty of room to showcase what you are capable of on the next section of your portfolio website.

Showcase your best work and skills

This is where you can really shine. Think about the most impactful projects you were involved with recently and use them as your main assets to prove your skills. Next to an overview description of the project scope and the used technologies, a real booster is to integrate social proof such as client feedback or testimonial statements.

Make your code available in a public repository

If the project allows it, make your code available in public repositories.This gives the reader an in-depth view on how you code. GitHub ist the way to go here from my perspective. It is one of the most popular and comprehensive platforms for publication and documentation of code as well as providing a remote version control repository

Choose a modern tech stack for your site

The tech you use for your website should represent your skills and interests. Personally, I’m quite interested in static site generators and the developments around the Jamstack. As I’m quite experienced in Vue.js, I decided to go with the static site generator Gridsome. Static site generators prerender your website after every Git Commit. This yields fast deliveries on request. No matter which tech stack you use, avoid by any means that your website is slow, buggy or not responsive.

Working at IONOS, the largest hosting company in Europe, I’m in the comfortable position to host my personal site on one of my company’s products. I decided to host my website on Deploy Now. Deploy Now allows instant deployments from GitHub and executes the build step of your static site generator automatically on Git Push.

Use my sample to get started

If you are interested in static site generators as well and want to give Gridsome a try, you can have a live look or directly checkout for your own portfolio site. In addition to Gridsome, it uses Windi CSS for the styling. With just a click on this button you can deploy your own instance via Deploy Now: