I’ve published one or two portfolios before, but I’ve never really settled on one. Every time I looked at mine, I felt it could be better.

So I would look at other people’s portfolios. I’d see how they presented their projects, how their pages looked, and what they were doing differently. I was looking for ideas, but I kept looking instead of working on my own.

At the end of it, I often did nothing. Or I would start building mine and give up halfway.

I wanted the perfect portfolio, and I was using that as a reason to keep delaying it.

Giving people somewhere to see my work

What finally got me to publish this version was realizing that if I kept delaying it, I might never put it out.

I know I’m good at what I do. But how would someone considering working with me see that if I had nowhere to show my work?

I couldn’t keep waiting until I liked every part of the site. I needed to put it out and keep improving it as I went.

Thinking about the people visiting

I wanted potential clients to look through what I’ve done and understand my thought process. I also wanted them to be able to reach out easily, without having to scroll through lots of content or click around looking for a way to contact me.

The portfolio also gives me a place to showcase the businesses I’ve worked with. Someone might come to see my work and discover a client’s business along the way. I like that it can do both.

Finding a starting point and choosing how to build it

The visual inspiration for my portfolio came from TD_Maxfolio, a Framer template credited to volt.supply. They offered it as a free template, and it gave me a direction I wanted to work with.

I’m a WordPress guy. Framer is a good platform, and I might try it in the future, but I wanted to build this portfolio with WordPress while exploring what Astro could offer.

So my thinking was: why not take inspiration from this Framer template and build my own version with Astro and WordPress?

I’d heard good things about Astro and seen performance tests that made me curious. Once I tried it myself, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it performed and decided to keep using it.

This was my first time pairing Astro with WordPress. WordPress handles the content, while Astro powers the frontend. The experience so far has impressed me and made me want to keep working with that combination.

Having a visual starting point helped. I could focus on adapting the direction to my work, my content, and the people I wanted to reach.

What I would do differently

If I were starting again, I would spend less time overthinking whether the portfolio was ready.

I still want it to look good and work well. But I don’t need to finish every improvement before I share it. That’s where I kept getting stuck before.

My advice to myself is to put the work out there, even if it’s not perfect. Then keep working on it.

At least now, when someone asks to see my work, I have somewhere to send them.

What’s something you’ve been putting off sharing because it doesn’t feel ready yet?