Building a website portfolio

[Shoseki]

Heya,

I am currently managing about 5 (including my own personal) websites, and I think its about time I kind of made a "portfolio".

My question is, has anyone done this before, and are there any pointers you could give me?

I am trying to expand upon my design styles / techniques at the moment because they all look a bit "academic", but I guess screenshots will suffice? How would you present the websites that you have designed to future employees?

Do you only put your front page design, or more than that? How do you explain about accessibility etc without printing a "no stylesheets" page?

 

[unwashed potato!]

will be intereesting to see what people say as all i have done is just put a picture and a link to the website, and then added a very brief description like, made 22 april 2007, made it for so and so as a site for there such and such, and i made it just using css etc.

 

[Shoseki]

Well, one of my colleagues just did a screen grab of the browser (buttons and all) with the website in it, but somehow it doesn't feel... all that professional.

And if I want it to print out...

Well, dunno yet...

 

[Augmented]

If I was viewing a portfolio, coming from a technical viewpoint, I'd be interested in seeing the following for each work:

• Your brief
• Your role(s) in the work - graphics, front-end, javascript etc.
• Timescale
• Technologies you used - .net, php, mysql.
• What (if any) frameworks or 3rd-party tools you used e.g. prototype for JS, cakePHP etc.
• What the highlight feature(s) of the site is, or what, in your opinion, is the part I should be most impressed by; be it a nice logo, a nifty ajaxified form or some clever programming logic.

Validation, doctype and accessibility level can be afterthoughts - I can see how well you code from simply looking at the source. Those features should just be standard anyway. Use that detail in your personal spiel - "I create websites that are awesome, compliant, accessible, search-engine-friendly blah blah"...

For images, I say focus on using 'teasers'. Highlight small cropped areas of the site that click through to larger crops - a nice rounded corner you were pleased with, a well-styled navigation bar or smart, balanced typography for example. Then add some full-page previews as extra - say one of the front and a couple of good inner-pages. Full-page previews are only really useful if the site is offline, or you'd like the viewer to see the page as it might look with nice font-rendering and browser chrome i.e. screengrabs from Safari. Otherwise the viewer can just visit the live site and see it in action. For redesigns, it may be worth showing before and after images.

The important thing, I feel, is to make it personal. There's nothing more offputting than looking at a portfolio and seeing a clinical list of works with short bullet points and no personal input (not too much of course, but give me something to work with).

/edit - I'm talking about an online portfolio here. It occurs to me when you say 'print out' that you might be talking about a physical paper portfolio?

 

[Shoseki]

I am thinking both - online and a high quality print, because you cannot send online C.V.s through the post and vice versa, it is nice to take along prints to interviews to discuss things.

I have been designer/producer of a commercial site for about 2.5 years now, but with only limited feedback and quality control, am looking to develop myself a bit further (am already well aware of standards but am looking for more design/layout experience). I have recently done a further 2-3 different websites but they are all a bit "samey" so I feel a little typecasted if I display to people my designs.

Problem is, I come from a technical (software engineering) background, not a design background, so you can imagine many of my designs feel a little "functional".

As it is, I could put crap on the website and I don't get a lot of feedback (well, I get customer feedback and they like it, but I don't get professional feedback) which doesn't exactly help my personal development.

I guess in the web design industry, there are two directions : join a proper web design company, in which you are pidgeon-holed into a specific area and end up specialising (say for example server side development etc) or join a regular company and develop / maintain their website for them, in which case you get a far more diverse role but don't end up really specialising (unless self-taught, as I am currently).