03 - How To Best Present Yourself On Your Portfolio?

Welcome to the third part of 14 Steps To A Career-Boosting Portfolio Interactive Course - I'm excited to start working with you on this!

If you missed it, read the announcement here!

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction - Why Should You Have A Portfolio?
2. Start Your Portfolio Faster With Hugo
3. How To Present Yourself In A Portfolio?
4. How Do You Publish Your Site Online?
5. Yes, It's Time To Write Your First Blog Post
6. How To Polish And Publish Your Blog Post
7. Guide To Spreading Your Online Presence
8. An Introduction To Building Your First (Tiny) App
9. Ideate And Choose A Stack For Your App
10. How Do You Analyize And Plan An Application?
11. A Guide To Project Setup Using Web Technologies
12. Getting Your Little App From Idea To Realization
13. Show Your App To The World By Deploying It
14. A Few Words About Maintenance And A Goodbye

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Lesson 3 - How To Best Present Yourself On Your Portfolio?

So, you've got your Hugo portfolio set up, and now you need to put some info up there.

Think about information you'd write there. You need basic info - your name, what you do, a way for people to contact you.

Your Name

The first thing people see when they come to your website should be your name. You are creating a portfolio in order to make a brand out of yourself, right? So market your name in the most visible place.

Should you include a picture of yourself? Yes, if you're comfortable doing it. It will make you seem more human and help connect you to the viewer.

With your name goes an email address. Put it somewhere visible, as it is the most commonly used method of communication.

Tagline

A usual thing that people and (companies as well) put on their websites is a tagline. It's a way to express yourself and tell people what you can do for them. The tagline is very important, as it's short and thus easy to read, and a good way for people looking at your portfolio to see if you match what they're looking for.

So what should you put in a tagline? Should you get all clever and creative? Should you go dull and to the point? Well, of course, the answer is - it depends. It depends on how you want to present yourself to the world and what kind of brand do you want to build for yourself.

If you want to portray yourself as a Web designer whose brain is bursting with creativity, you will opt for an imaginative, unexpected tagline that will make a strong impression on your viewers. Maybe something like "Hey Picaso, drop your brushes - I am an artist of the digital world. A designer.". And if you want to come off as a highly educated computer scientist, you'd say something like "Designing complex data classification algorithms that help me gain insight into the distribution of ..." - I don't even know how to finish that sentence. Moving on.

The best choice would be something cheerful and positive, that still describes what you do. Something along the lines of "Hi! I love drinking coffee and designing beautiful websites with focus on performance.". Aim for a bit of personality and a bit of professionalism.

Social Media links

No portfolio is complete without icons linking to your social media accounts. But which ones should you put there? Certainly not the link to your online dating profile.

You want to go with more professional profiles, like LinkedIn. But what exact links you choose depends on your field. If you're a designer, you'd list profiles on Dribbble or Behance. For programmers, StackOverflow and GitHub are great choices. Also, don't put too many. A few is enough.

I would also say not to list Facebook or Instagram there. It's just personal stuff. Does it add any value to your professional profile? Nope.

The ones that are universal are LinkedIn, Twitter and Skype. List the ones that you're using the most.

Projects

Now onto the real stuff - listing your projects.

First off - don't give up if you don't have any projects! It's okay to leave it empty for now, but there are also some things that you can put there even if you never created an app.

Here are some suggestions on what to put there. You could list ideas for apps you will create in the future - just make sure you point out that they're not implemented yet. Or you could list things that you are learning about. Think about what can you write that can make you look good to your target audience. And sure, you can make it sound awesome, just don't lie.

Secondly, how complex should the projects you create for your portfolio be? Not much. Especially if you're just starting out - don't take tons of time to create something for your portfolio. Why? Because showcasing your side projects on the portfolio is not about bragging how complex and popular your apps are.

It's actually about showing companies that you can take an idea, start implementing it and see it through to completion. I know what you're thinking - creating a simple app is easy, why bother! It's not easy - at all. There's tons of things that don't go as you've expected, bugs seem to come out of nowhere, and when you're done programming, the process of releasing the app is also nontrivial. That's why showing that you can take even the simplest idea and turn it into a finished product is so important. Over time your projects will become more advanced, sure, and that's something to look forward to. But you've got to start somewhere.

In case you already have a few projects or other accomplishments to list, how should you present them? The best approach is to provide a demo wherever possible. If you've published an app to the app store, put a link and a screenshot. If you've designed something, an image preview is a must.

Also, order them so that the most recent ones are at the top, and include a title and a short description. Tell people what it is, what it does and how it was created. Tell them what design principles or what technologies you used. It will help recruiters looking at your profile to better understand your skills.

Blog

I highly recommend having a blog on your portfolio. By blogging you're positioning yourself as the authority on a certain topic. That is truly a great boost to your online presence. We will talk more about this in the next module, but for now, take a few minutes to think about what you'd write on your blog.

It could be an article about a project that you created, or about your experience of learning a certain technology. Or it could be more general, like "How to become a programmer if you have a X background".

Should you focus on more technical or more general content? I'd say write about both, but have a preference for a more non-technical type of content, since most of your visitors will probably not have a technical background.

Now, should you write about that time when your cat jumped on your face and startled you? No, keep it related to your profession! If you really want though, feel free to use this guide for your personal cat stories blog, and shoot me a link.

Tasks

For this assignment, you'll come up with the basic content for your portfolio.

Think about the things from above, and tailor them for yourself. Come up with a tagline, decide which social media profiles you'll include in your website and think about listing your projects or other stuff.

Then, take some time to take the code you've created in the previous assignment, and fill in the content in there.

As a result, send me either a GitHub url of your portfolio project, or just a written list of the content that you'll include in the website.

Take care and stay Open Source!

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What's up next?

Next we talk about publishing your portfolio for the world to see!

The next lesson is scheduled for Thursday, September the 21. 2017.

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Thanks!

Drop an upvote if you liked the article, share if you believe it will be of help to someone. Feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments below.

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