Your portfolio needs to be mobile friendly!

Design it mobile first. Mobile traffic accounts for about half of all internet traffic worldwide. So, there is a great chance your recruiter or hiring manager will look at it in mobile view.

Make sure you include links to other live projects, pages with live projects, and/or video snippets to live code.

You should already have a link to your Github as well, but your future employer is going to want to see if you can launch something live. Remember, most recruiters and hiring managers will only spend a couple of minutes at most looking at your portfolio! Having live code let’s them play with the cool features you have built. If you can’t launch everything live, grab it with a (short) screen capture video.

Integrate code snippets OR a CSS framework is ok and encouraged!

This shows you can integrate code into a live site. In the real dev world it’s common to incorporate snippets into a project. This also shows that you are able to work with someone else’s code!

Integrating code snippets or frameworks also ensures that your site will look great. CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Semantic are already responsive and mobile friendly. Your portfolio will look better, it will be created faster, and you are less likely to be writing bugs by trying to create all that custom code.

The url should be readable and custom.

You want yourname.com. If yourname.com isn’t available, try for .net, .io, etc. The point here is to make it professional and easy to type in. Don’t include a middle initial if it makes your name read weird.

Make sure any custom code is clean.

Remove comments and get the formatting right. If your potential employer inspects your portfolio site, will they find a professional work, or a bunch of curse words and commented out notes and blocks?

Your resume should be downloadable!

They probably don’t have a copy. This is easy to do and it is often overlooked, AND you may get them to now look at your resume. Be sure to also link out to your LinkedIn, Blog, Github, etc, but you don’t need to link to everything under the sun! Keep it to just a few external links, so they can get a better picture of who you are.

Lastly, QA it!

Check all your links. Check it for typos. Check for spelling. Try to break your site. Make sure your hard work was done right!