Background

In October, I gave myself a week to completely remake my portfolio website. Since then, I’ve doom-scrolled hundreds more - looking for new layouts, animations, and ideas I could apply to my own projects.

If you’re trying to get a tech job in this absolutely cooked job market, having a solid portfolio WILL help you stand out.

In this blog, I aim to break down the 3 most important aspects you need to be thinking about when trying to make your own portfolio website.

A Small Note: I don't want to directly call out anyone's portfolio website to showcase a mistake, but I will be definitely shouting out websites I absolutely loved :D

1. Hireability

Recruiters don't have time.

They glance at most resumes for about 3 seconds before making a judgement.

For a portfolio website, you have about 30~60 seconds to answer:

• Who are you?
• What kind of developer are you?
• Where are you based?
• What do you build / what are your skills?

Recruiters are asking: "Can I imagine hiring this person?" "Can this person get the job I need done?"

Your website should make it easy for them to say YES. If they need to scour your entire website to find the information they're looking for, they're just going to skip to the next candidate.

Biggest Red Flags

Claiming to be a Frontend/UI/UX Developer... but having bad UI

If you claim you someone who cares about design, responsiveness, or user experience, the fastest way to lose trust is by shipping a site that lacks attention to detail:

• Inconsistent padding/spacing
• Misaligned text
• Broken layouts
• Poor responsiveness

These things COULD be passable if you're a backend developer. But unforgiveable if you're applying for frontend focused roles.

If a recruiter is trying to hire a frontend developer, they look at your portfolio site to give them an idea of what their site is going to look like if they hire you. And if they don't like the looks of your website, there's no chance they're going to trust you with creating theirs.

Skill bars with meaningless percentages

"JavaScript - 80%" "Python - 75%"

Nobody knows what that means. There's no frame of reference. And it gives 0 insight into what you do. I'm a big fan of showing not telling, and letting your work/projects speak for themselves.

Outdated / Incorrect Info

Make sure you're maintaining your portfolio website. Small things that don't take a lot to change:

• Age not matching birth year (e.g. "21 y.o" but born in 2000)
• Old roles being listed as "Active"
• Broken links to out of date projects.

If you have a link to a project:

1. Make the link open in a second tab. Do not take the user off the portfolio
2. If the app is down, just link it to the GitHub repo. Or if the repository is not very impressive (e.g. only 1~2 commits) probably just leave that project off your website.

I'm also not a fan of adding blog posts if you're not posting consistently, but this one's really up to you

Being a Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Listing 100 skills...

• Mobile dev
• AI
• Web dev
• Cybersecurity
• Cloud engineering
• Social media marketing

...is NOT the flex you think it is. Most recruiters are afraid of the generalist, because the generalist thinks they know a lot of things, but in reality, because they're so generalised, they probably don't.

When people are hiring they are not looking for the "all-in-one" person. Even if they're hiring for fullstack, they want someone who knows whatever their tech stack is and is really good at it. They are going to trust someone who is strong at 1~2 things over the person who says they're good at everything.

What Good Hireability Looks Like

Ang Wei Feng (Ted)'s Portfolio is a good example if you're an SWE with work experience and just want a simple website to showcase that. It tells a recruiter everything they need to know about him in a straightforward, easy to read way.

What if you don't have any work experience yet? Go work on a bunch of projects. Check out Jason Cameron's Portfolio. At a glance, it’s obvious what he builds and why he’s worth paying attention to. He's made open source projects used by big names like The United Nations and The Linux Foundation.

One detail I especially liked is the recent commits log. It naturally leads you to his GitHub, where you're met with a contribution graph that's lit up like a Christmas tree (5000 commits in the last year.)

Side Note: if you don't know what projects to work on, open source projects are your playground. Instead of just following a tutorial, go clone a repo, break things, fix them, and repeat.

If you're more experienced, make a website that shows off how good you are at what you do. Ponpon Mania by Patrick Heng and Justine Soulie is a beautiful interactive comic that showcases the creator's coding and illustration skills masterfully.

2. Aesthetics

Does it look good? Is it responsive? Is it too overwhelming? Does it hurt to look at?

Your design doesn't need to win awards. But it does need to feel intentional.

User Interface

Even if you're not a frontend developer, I'm sure you can point out these glaring mistakes:

• Terrible text contrast
• Overly wordy paragraphs
• Eye burning color palettes
• Not having high resolution images / stretched images

Another thing is having too many animations. Just because you can add a bunch of fancy components from Magic UI to your portfolio to make it look like a bunch of stuff is going on, doesn't mean you should. When there are so many things competing for your user's attention, it's going to make the site feel overwhelming.

This goes for colors as well. Color contrasts can make things really hard to read.

Something popular I've also been seeing is:

1. A typewriter effect that rotates between different texts (e.g. "I'm a Full Stack Developer" -> "I'm a AI/ML enthusiast")
2. A marquee that scrolls through your different skills

Why are you hiding information behind a wait time? What if a recruiter is looking for Python experience, but only C, Java, and JavaScript are visible at the moment? They're going to scroll past and miss it.

User Experience

First, you need to make sure your design is responsive. People are going to look at your websites from different devices and screen sizes (Laptops, Ultrawide monitors, Tablets, Phones). You have to ensure your layout is responsive.

Simple things like:

• Sensible text widths
• Centered hero text
• Responsive font scaling

go a long way.

You also have sites that feel like an entire experience overall.

This website: The Sea We Breathe by Unseen Studio is AMAZING interactive experience that makes the user feel like they're going on a journey in the deep ocean.

Another incredible website I'd like to share is The Monolith Project by Ethan Chiu and Fabian Tjoe-A-On. Storytelling with immersive user interaction, accompanied with beautiful illustrations, sound effects and music.

But you don't need a professional web development team to make a website with good UX. Duy Lee's Portfolio is filled with fun, non-intrusive microinteractions that feel nice and interactive.

A small touch I really liked was him adding a pronounciation hint for his name. It shows that he thought about the user experience, not just in terms of what the user sees, but how they would feel when they land on your website.

3. Creativity

A lot of times developers just want to get their portfolio site out there. While I think there are many times where shipping fast is good, I want you to really take your time with making your portfolio website. If it feels like you made the website in an hour just to check off the idea of having a portfolio site, it's not going to help you.

Think about your portfolio as a project itself. Find something ambitious, something creative that you don't know if you can make it yet. Use your portfolio as an opportunity to learn.

Another thing is making sure to add your own personal touch.

Bruno Simon's Portfolio is one of my favourite 3D websites that feels truly unique in a way that other people just haven't done before.

I think the biggest red flag is using a boilerplate/template for your portfolio site. 2026 is just around the corner + we have the internet + you're a developer. You can code your own website

Speaking of AI, there are some telltale signs that you vibecoded your site. ... . And if you are going to use AI to code your portfolio, it better look amazing. If recruiters know:

1. You didn't code it yourself
2. You don't know enough about programming / design as a developer to be able to guide the AI to make the site look good

that is a double red flag.

Closing Remarks

No matter how many of these portfolio tips you take, if you're bad at coding or rely on AI for everything, it's going to show in your work. I would really advise you to take the time to learn web development fundamentals and building smaller projects to test your skills rather than making a portfolio website straight from the get go.

If your website has some of the red flags mentioned in the article, don't feel too bad. Don't give up and take your site down. Take the initiative to improve your portfolio. I gurantee you'll end up not only as a better developer, but also a lot more successful in your career than the people who get criticised and just never look at the project again.

Being a software developer means constantly learning, taking feedback, growing, and improving your skills. If you cannot do that with something as personal as representative of who you are as your portfolio site, that's probably a decent indicator of how your career will go.

I wanna make my website! Where can I find some inspiration?

Awwwards has always been my favorite. But you can also check out Dribbble and Behance.

For developer portfolio websites specifically, there's this Github repository with over 1000 portfolios you can look at (some of which I featured on this blog)