Portfolio website design that finally does your work justice

Why a portfolio website, not just Instagram or Behance

Platforms are a good place to be seen. They're a poor place to be judged. On Instagram your strongest project sits between a meme and an advert, the layout is the same as everyone else's, and the platform decides who sees it. A social media page belongs to somebody else and changes its rules whenever it feels like it.

A personal portfolio website is the opposite. It's the one link you control: on your CV, in your email signature, in your bio, on your quotes. It shows the work you choose, in the order you choose, and says exactly what you want it to say. Keep your platforms, and give them somewhere proper to point to.

Do you need a designer, or will a template do?

Sometimes a template is enough, and I'd rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need. If you need a basic page by Friday and your work is mostly words, a builder template can do the job. My comparison of a custom website vs Wix and WordPress goes through the trade-offs properly.

A designed portfolio makes sense when the template starts working against you. Your photos get cropped strangely, every page looks like the theme's demo, it crawls on a phone, or it simply doesn't feel like you. That last one matters. A wedding photographer and a software developer shouldn't have the same website, any more than a bakery and a law firm should share a colour.

What a good portfolio needs, depending on who you are

A portfolio for a photographer and one for a consultant share almost nothing except a contact button. Before I design anything, I want to know who will look at yours and what you want them to do afterwards. Here's roughly what each kind of portfolio website needs to get right:

Makeup artists, musicians and photographers often need clients to book them, not just admire the work. In that case the portfolio can include a proper booking and enquiry flow, so requests land in your inbox with the date and details you need, instead of getting lost in a pile of DMs.

• Photographers and artists: big images that still load quickly on mobile data, very little text, and galleries grouped the way clients actually choose
• Graphic designers: fewer projects, shown properly, each with the brief, your thinking and the final result
• Makeup artists and musicians: your strongest work up front, then a clear way to book or enquire, often straight to WhatsApp
• Consultants: what you help with, who you help, proof you've done it, and an easy way to enquire
• Students and graduates: projects, skills, a CV employers can download and a simple way to reach you
• Software developers: projects that explain what you built, the problem it solved and the tools you used, with links to the code

Portfolio websites for students, graduates and job seekers

A CV website, or resume website, gives an employer more than a PDF can. They can see the project, not just read a bullet point about it. For a graduate with little formal experience, that can be the difference between looking like every other applicant and looking like someone who has actually built or made things.

This one is personal for me. I'm a student myself, in the second year of an IIE Bachelor of Computer and Information Sciences. I started with no coding experience at all and went on to graduate top of my class of more than 200 in the Higher Certificate. I know what it's like to need to show what you can do before there's a job title to point to.

If you're studying IT or computer science and would rather build your own portfolio site, that's a brilliant project too. I also tutor web and mobile development, and building your own portfolio is a practical way to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript properly, with something real to show at the end.

Portfolio website examples: what to look for

When you browse portfolio website examples, it's easy to fall for the flashiest ones. Look past the animation and ask simpler questions. Can you tell what this person does within a few seconds? Does the work load quickly on your phone? Is there one obvious way to get in touch? Could a busy client find what they need without hunting?

The site you're on is my own personal site, and the clearest example of how I build: hand-coded from scratch, made to work properly on a phone, and written so Google can find it. It's also a fair test of whether my taste suits yours. If you'd want something quieter or bolder, say so. Your site should feel like you, not like me.

How I design and build your portfolio

First we talk: who will look at your portfolio, what you want them to think, and what you want them to do next. Then I show you a direction, with layout, colour and type, before anything is built. You react honestly and we adjust until it feels right. Only then do I start writing code.

I build it by hand, test it on a phone and a laptop, and you see it come together rather than only at the end. When it goes live, your domain is connected, everything is checked and I walk you through it. You own the site and the domain, I hand over the files, and I stay reachable if you want changes later.

A degree teaches you how to make a website work. It doesn't teach you the feel of a thing: the right spacing, the right colour, the moment a page stops looking cheap. For a portfolio, where the whole point is how your work comes across, that instinct is the part I bring.