Your portfolio & past work samples are super important to get hired and even land your first couple of jobs. Most beginner web developers wait until they got real jobs.
And they plan to create their portfolio after they will finish new projects. But this is not an efficient way to get jobs and showcase your competence.
You have to be proactive before you start pitching your prospects.
Showcase your past work samples without having real experience working with clients
After you gained web development skills at a certain level and thinking to offer quality services to customers, the first step is to build a couple of sample websites. Luckily, you don’t have to buy premium domains & hosting for each sample.
Think of it as a time investment in your web development business.
How to create work samples using GitHub Pages
There are a couple of free options that you can take advantage of. For example, GitHub Pages are great examples. It’s a free opportunity for developers, you get a high-speed server, and every time you get a unique URL (subdomain) for each project.
So build some static websites on your computer, create Repositories for each of them, push the projects using Git, and build some work samples.
If this sound looks complicated to you, see how to create GitHub pages quickly. It’s not as hard as it seems. After all, you’re a web developer.
Anyways, after you created those samples, upload them one by one to your main portfolio. If you need more help creating your portfolio website, you can download one of my portfolio templates for free. Feel free to make edits and use this template for your web development portfolio.
The button below will take you to another post and from there, you can see the guideline & download the template. How cool is that!
Take me there »There are a couple of other free & similar options such as Heroku, Netlify, etc. Use only any one of the platforms, become familiar with it, and stick with it.
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Conclusion
Building an engaging & effective portfolio is not only time-consuming but also hard. But it’s worth doing.
Showcasing your past work samples does not only mean that you have to work with clients in real life. You can build projects before getting hired and showcase your expertise.
Your prospects and future buyers want to see your experience and samples before they make a final decision.
And creating those sample projects does not hurt. Perhaps, it enhances your creativity and increases productivity.
So, it’s worth creating professional portfolio samples before you start pitching your prospects. Give your prospects a reason & chance to hire you.
