Is Building Your Own Portfolio a Waste of Time?

When you begin developing applications on your own for the first time, I would argue one of the first things that you do is build a portfolio website. Maybe you’re entering the job market for the first time and need to show off your skills. Or, perhaps you want to practice using a new tool, framework, or service.

While developing your portfolio is a great way to build up your development chops, in this post I’m going to outline some thoughts on why you might NOT want to build your portfolio and opt for using a site-building service instead.

Time & Effort

Developing any application on your own takes a lot of time and effort. One advantage over using an existing service (you’ve heard of them: Squarespace, Wix, Carrd, etc.) is that you’ll save a great deal of time when creating your portfolio. You might be thinking, “Exactly what I want! More practice!” While this is true, you could ask yourself, is that what you want to be practicing?

I would argue that at a point in your web development journey, you’re going to be practicing lower-level skills when making a portfolio. Of course, when you are brand new to web development, you need to practice layouts, styles, flexbox, grid, and all the things. Once you get these concepts down, however, I would argue there is no need to continually “practice” these skills. The world of web development is constantly evolving, and you’ll always have opportunities to practice the basics as you build…well, anything. Why spend time on a simple portfolio when you could spend time on something more complex?

Professional Design

Are you a professional designer? Maybe! But what if you are not? I for one am not a professional designer. Sure, I can make some cool layouts, but it only takes a quick Google Image search of unique or inspiring designs to remind myself that there are individuals out there in the world who are way more adept at creating compelling visual layouts or thinking of new ways to make information stand out in a sea of similar design.

So, could you design your own site? Sure! But chances are for most of us, that’s not our forte. There is a reason companies have UI, UX, and graphic designers working for them. Using a service allows you to avoid competing (visually) with what some of the best out there can do, and allows you more time to focus on developing your skills elsewhere.

Accessibility and User-Friendliness

One huge advantage to using a website building service for your site is that it’s almost guaranteed to be more accessible and user-friendly. Any good developer should have the capacity to create accessible websites and create a user-friendly UI, but that takes time. All that time you spend trying to make your site fit an endless amount of screen sizes could be a good practice at some point, but is it always the best way to spend your time? Maybe you have a side project that needs the same attention, and simply offloading that work for your site can allow you to use the same skills elsewhere, where you get more bang for your buck (time-wise).

Cost-Effectiveness

You might assume that using a service is going to cost more money than just making a simple. Honestly, that’s probably true if you generate a static site. However, quite often there is a lot of overhead with ensuring your static site is hosted somewhere that allows you to use a custom domain, or involves a lot of time taken when you need to rebuild your website or make a change.

This essentially brings us back to my first point, again, time and effort. While it’s possible to make a site for free, it’s almost always going to take you much more time to manage it yourself than to pay a couple of bucks a month for a service that is going to guarantee that x, y, and z are always up and running.

Consider a simple contact form. You’re going to need a whole email API or rely on some funky form feature (like Netlify forms) that lets you roundabout receive information from a submitted form. Not super elegant. Free? Yes. Easy? Debatable.

TLDR; Focus on higher-level projects

At the end of the day, my argument is this:

The purpose of a portfolio is for someone to be able to see your work, get some basic info about you, and perhaps contact you. While all of these features are essential to learn and be comfortable with developing yourself, it’s not very “high-leverage,” meaning…it’s pretty simple at the end of the day. Creating these features from scratch can take a good deal of time and oversight, so once you CAN do this on your own, it’s time to work on more complex projects that will stretch and grow you as a developer. Chances are, you’re still going to be continually creating everything you’d include on a portfolio site anyway.

So should you make your own portfolio? Maybe? But it might be time to question whether or not you waste time reworking portfolios constantly instead of spending your time challenging yourself in other ways.

Bonus: What I’m Using

So, what do I use, and why?

Currently, my portfolio site is built on carrd.co. I first discovered this site when looking for a simple landing page for my wife. Turns out, it was a great platform for a simple portfolio. I didn’t want my projects on my site, so much as a landing page for contact, resume, and forwarding anyone who finds it to where I have my actual projects (like Github).

If I wanted to have some example projects, I could easily add a few.

If I wanted a blog, videos, or something else, I’d probably go with something else like SquareSpace, although it’s more expensive and I don’t need/care for those features.

At the end of the day, it’s simple, but it took me about 20 minutes to get set up and now I have all the time in the day to work on other side projects, Leetcode challenges, or go outside.