Kartik Nair

Posted on May 2, 2020

Finally built a portfolio/personal website. Can I get a review?

#portfoliio #webdev #javascript #career

Hello everyone! I decided to put some time away this week and build a solid personal website and blog for myself and here's the final result: https://kartikn.me. It's built using Next.js and hosted on Vercel, the code for it is also open-source.

I just needed some advice because currently I'm a university student (in my first year) and I was considering getting a job over the summer break or working freelance. Would this be a good idea? Am I ready?

Top comments (29)

Aral Roca • May 2 '20 • Edited

I recommend to use the component Link of Nextjs to navigate between pages, to avoid the full reload:

import Link from 'next/link'

// ...
<Link href="/page">
 <a>Page</a>
</Link>

Then, I recommend generating the RSS feed and Sitemap of your blog on build-time. You can look to my blog aralroca.com that I did recently (also with Next.js), and the code is github.com/aralroca/aralroca.com

Kartik Nair • May 2 '20

Damn thanks so much I was just looking into generating an RSS feed and couldn't find much. You're a life saver! Also I'll be sure to fix the Link

Mike • May 2 '20

Some recommendations based off my initial reaction/thoughts

Add a slight gradient to your background to kick up the overall visual design
Test different font types on your Headers
Add a very slight box shadow to your images
Create a logo or some type of design based on your name
Create a contact form on your contact page

Kartik Nair • May 2 '20

Thanks so much for taking the time to give such detailed advice I'll give these a shot and see how it goes!

Dog Smile Factory • May 2 '20 • Edited

Nice work Kartik. You have a real talent for design. You might want to consider taking the menu that appears on the home and the writing pages and including it on the about and contact pages. Consistency of design is helpful to your users. But you should feel very encouraged by the progress you are making!

Kartik Nair • May 2 '20

Ah ok I'll give it a go and see how it looks. Thanks!

a_mature_dev • May 2 '20

Looks great

Kartik Nair • May 2 '20

Thanks man!

Adrian Barylski • May 3 '20

Very nice a clean website. Good job 👏
One thing that I would recommend changing is the size of the images. The max width they seem to be on my screen is ~650px yet the loaded images are ~4000px. Reducing the size of those images will greatly improve the load speed of your site :)

agtoever • May 3 '20 • Edited

Looks very nice. Clean design, but not too “basic”. I liked the Noize.ml project. There is a typo in the url to producthunt. The w3c link checker is a nice tool to catch such things.

Clara • May 2 '20 • Edited

What a nice looking portfolio page - so clean and straight forward. And your projects are so creative and beautiful too!

Kartik Nair • May 2 '20

Thank you!

Vadzim • May 2 '20

Nice design. Especially amazing typography

Kartik Nair • May 2 '20

Thanks! The typeface is Noah. I'm a big fan of it and also fontfabric's other typefaces.

emTr0 • May 3 '20

Looks very nice!

Rahul Jain • May 3 '20

Portfolio looks amazing Kartik. Best part is the minimal design scheme!
Keep it up!
Adding dark/light theme toggle functionality will be a good thing to your portfolio.
Cheers