How to Build a Portfolio Website: What to Include, Field by Field

What a portfolio website needs: which projects to show, how to describe each one, where to publish it free, and the mistakes that make reviewers close the tab.

Canonical: https://www.prezumi.com/blog/how-to-build-a-portfolio-website

A portfolio website is a small site, usually three to five pages, that shows your best work to the people deciding whether to hire you. Building one comes down to four decisions: which three to six projects to show, how to describe each one, which supporting pages to add around them, and where to publish the result. This guide walks through all four, with specifics for developers, designers, writers, and freelancers.

You don't need design skills or a budget to end up with something good. By the end you'll know what belongs on every page, how to write the short project descriptions that do most of the persuading, and which publishing route fits your situation — there's a detailed cost comparison in the free portfolio website guide if that's your first question.

Who actually needs one

If your work can be shown, a portfolio website helps you. For designers, illustrators, and photographers it's simply expected: reviewers shortlist from the work itself, and an application without a link to it usually stalls. For developers it has become close to standard, because a deployed project answers questions an employment history can't. Writers use one to collect clips that would otherwise be scattered across ten outlets. Freelancers and consultants lean on theirs hardest of all, since prospective clients rarely ask for anything else before a first call.

A portfolio sits alongside a resume rather than replacing it — most hiring processes ask for both, and each does a different job. If you're unsure what a given application calls for, the portfolio vs resume guide sorts that out, and for the other document there's a full guide on how to write a resume.

Step 1: Pick the projects

Choose three to six pieces and resist adding more. Reviewers spend their limited time on whatever you put first, so every weak piece you include dilutes a strong one. Nielsen Norman Group's research-based portfolio guidance reaches the same conclusion for UX designers: a few thoroughly documented projects earn more interviews than a wall of thumbnails, because the documentation is what reviewers actually read.

A project earns its place when it clears four tests:

• It's recent. Work from the last two or three years. One older piece is fine if it's genuinely your best.
• It matches the work you want. Show branding projects to get branding work. A portfolio aimed everywhere lands nowhere in particular.
• It has an outcome you can state. Shipped, published, used by clients, grew a metric. "Concept work" is allowed early on, but label it as such.
• You're allowed to show it. Check NDAs before publishing client work.

If an NDA blocks your strongest project, describe it anyway with the identifying details removed: the industry, the problem, your role, and the result. "Rebuilt the checkout flow for a mid-size fashion retailer; payment failures dropped 40%" shows the skill without naming the client.

Step 2: Write each project up properly

The write-up is where portfolios are won. A bare image or repo link forces the reviewer to guess what they're looking at, and they won't spend long guessing. Every project needs four short parts: the context (who it was for and what problem it solved), your role (especially on team projects — claim your part, no more), one decision or difficulty worth explaining, and the outcome. Four to eight sentences covers it.

Expectations differ by field, so here's the shape reviewers look for in each:

The portfolio website examples guide goes deeper on each row, with an annotated structure you can copy for your field and the filler each type of reviewer wishes people would cut.

Step 3: Add the supporting pages

The work is the site's core, and everything else exists to frame it. Three supporting elements are enough:

• A home page that gets to the point. Your name, what you do, and who you do it for in one or two sentences, with selected work visible without scrolling far. Visitors decide in seconds whether they're in the right place; make the answer obvious.
• An about page with a short bio. A paragraph or two: your background, what you're good at, what you're currently open to. Written like a person, in the first person. A photo is optional and helps more than most people expect.
• A contact route that takes one click. A plain email link beats a contact form — forms fail silently and add friction. Add your LinkedIn and, for developers, your GitHub profile.
• Optionally, your resume. A link to a PDF or a live resume page saves recruiters a request. Keep its dates and titles consistent with the portfolio, because mismatches get noticed.

Step 4: Publish it

Three routes cover almost everyone, and the honest differences between them are cost, time, and how much building falls on you:

Prezumi's route works from one profile: you upload a CV or fill in your details once, pick from the portfolio template gallery, and the site is generated — switching designs later doesn't mean re-entering anything. The resume-to-website tool does the CV-to-site conversion in one step, and freelancers get a dedicated walkthrough covering proposals and client-facing links.

Design and performance basics

Whichever route you take, a handful of technical details decide whether the site helps or quietly hurts:

• Check it on a phone. A large share of first visits arrive from a link tapped in email or LinkedIn on mobile. If images overflow or text needs pinch-zooming, fix that before sharing the link anywhere.
• Compress your images. Google's Core Web Vitals guidance treats 2.5 seconds as the threshold for a good largest-contentful-paint, and image-heavy portfolios are exactly the sites that miss it. Export images at the size they'll display, and the problem mostly disappears.
• Keep the typography boring. One or two typefaces, dark text on a light background or the reverse, generous spacing. The work should be the most interesting thing on every page.
• Write alt text for the work. It makes the site usable with a screen reader and describes your images to search engines at the same time.

Mistakes that undo the work

• Showing everything you've ever made. The portfolio is judged by its weakest visible piece. Cut to the best three to six and archive the rest.
• Projects with no words. An unexplained screenshot tells a reviewer nothing about your thinking, and your thinking is what they're hiring.
• Dead demos and placeholder text. A broken link on a developer portfolio, or a lorem-ipsum paragraph anywhere, reads as carelessness with your own most important project.
• No visible way to contact you. People genuinely publish portfolios without an email address. Test the whole path: could a stranger who likes your work reach you in one click?
• A site that's visibly stale. A "latest work" section that stops two years ago raises a question you don't want raised. If you won't update it, remove the dates.
• Effects that get in the way. Autoplaying sound, heavy intro animations, and splash screens all delay the only thing visitors came for.

Build the content once

Prezumi holds your projects, history, and skills as a single profile and renders it as both a portfolio website and an ATS-friendly resume. Import an existing CV to skip the retyping, choose a design from the template gallery, and publish with a shareable link on the free plan. When a piece needs better wording, the AI editor rewrites your real entries while you watch — and because resume and portfolio come from the same profile, updating one keeps the other in step.

FAQ

How many projects should a portfolio website have?

Three to six for most fields, and the smaller end of that range is usually stronger. Reviewers spend a few minutes at most on a first visit, which means they'll open one or two pieces — almost always the ones you placed first. Every additional project mostly adds risk: a weak piece in position seven can undo the impression a strong piece made in position one, because portfolios get judged by their weakest visible work. The sensible counts vary a little by field. Developers do well with three or four deployed projects that each get a proper write-up. Designers typically show four to six case studies. Writers can stretch to ten clips because each takes seconds to assess. Photographers work differently again, with one tight gallery of fifteen to twenty-five images. In every case the rule is the same: if you're unsure whether a piece is strong enough to include, it isn't, and cutting it makes the portfolio better.

Do I need to know how to code to build a portfolio website?

No. Coding is one route among several, and it's the right one mainly for developers, where a hand-built site hosted on something like GitHub Pages doubles as evidence of skill. Everyone else has two no-code options. Site builders such as Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow give you a visual editor and templates; expect to spend a weekend arranging layouts, and expect the free tiers to include platform ads and a branded subdomain until you pay. Portfolio generators like Prezumi remove the layout work too: you enter your projects and history once, or upload a CV, and the site is generated from a template you can swap at any time. That route gets a presentable site online in minutes and leaves your time for the part that actually persuades people, which is choosing the right projects and writing them up well.

How much does a portfolio website cost?

It can genuinely cost nothing, with known trade-offs. GitHub Pages hosts static sites free with no ads, if you can build one. Site-builder free plans are free indefinitely but show platform ads and give you a branded subdomain like yourname.wixsite.com; removing both typically costs $10–25 a month. Prezumi's free plan includes a generated portfolio and resume with a temporary shareable link, and a permanent link costs $3 a month on Pro. The one cost no route avoids is a custom domain: yourname.com runs about $10–15 a year from any registrar, and it's worth having once you're actively sharing the site. A reasonable path is to start free, confirm the portfolio is actually getting used in your applications, and add the domain when it is.

What do I put in a portfolio if I have no client work yet?

Self-initiated work, presented with the same seriousness as client work. Pick the kind of job you want and build two or three pieces that look like it: a developer can ship a small working product with a clean README and a live demo; a designer can redesign a real product's flow and document the decisions; a writer can publish well-edited pieces on a personal blog or platforms that accept submissions. Course projects and student work count when the write-up focuses on the problem and your decisions rather than the assignment. Label speculative work honestly — "unsolicited redesign" or "personal project" — because reviewers don't mind that it wasn't commissioned; they mind being misled. What convinces them is seeing the finished quality and the reasoning, and both of those are fully under your control before anyone hires you.

Should my portfolio website include my resume?

Yes, and it's one of the easier wins. Recruiters who arrive at your portfolio often need the resume next, and having it one click away — as a downloadable PDF or a live page — saves them an email and keeps momentum. Two details matter. First, consistency: job titles and dates on the resume must match what the portfolio says, because mismatches invite doubts that spread to everything else. Second, freshness: an outdated resume attached to a current portfolio is worse than no resume at all. This is the drift problem tools like Prezumi exist to solve, by generating both documents from one profile so an edit in either place updates both. If you maintain them separately, put a recurring reminder in your calendar to reconcile them, because they will drift.

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