Building a Portfolio

Building a web portfolio is easy. Everyone wants a website. The problem is, everyone wants a bad website. If you do not design websites, chances are, you do not understand proper design. The hardest part of designing a clients website is caving in and making the site the way they want, when you know that it looks terrible. But it is part of life. The client is always right, no matter how wrong they are.

To build up a portfolio you have several options. One is to try and sell yourself out to people for cheap. Do about five sites for next to nothing. The problem here is that when people pay, they control every aspect of how it looks. Sometimes that is good, but as I mentioned above, mostly it is bad.

The next option is to offer to do them for free, with the stipulation that you have last say in the way it looks. Not everyone will agree to this, but it is worth a shot.

The last (and probably best) way to build your portfolio is to buy five domain names and pop up five sites, centered around companies you would like to run (fictional of course). Incorporate all the typical elements you would expect in a website. Study other websites in the industries you chose and mimic them.

Lastly, make sure the websites stay online. Don’t design them and print them on paper. It makes it seem like your site wasn’t designed well enough to stay in business and that definitely will not get you the job.

Summary

Once more, books can be written about the above subject, and books have been written about each programming language a thousand times over (I should know, I’ve written one!). But this guide should get you going in asking the right questions and making the right steps. No matter what job you get, presentation of yourself and your skills is the number one key that will determine if you land that dream job. Hopefully this article (or one of the others in the series) will help you do just that!