Best work first, no chronology
Newest-first is a filing system, not a case. Lead with the strongest piece regardless of when it was made, and cut everything you would not want to be judged on.
Portfolio Website Designs
A portfolio is read by someone deciding whether to spend money or make an offer, usually in under two minutes, usually on a phone, usually with several other tabs open. That is the whole brief.
The layouts here put work first because that is what the visitor came for. A portfolio whose home page is an animated introduction is asking for patience from the one audience that has none.
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Put the image in public/assets/lander/ and add an entry to src/data/landers.ts with its real pixel width and height.
What makes this layout work
Show the problem, not just the pixels
A screenshot shows what you made. Two lines on the constraint and what changed because of your work shows that you can think, which is what is actually being assessed.
Say what you did on team projects
"Worked on" is read as ambiguity. Naming your part is more credible than implying the whole, and experienced reviewers assume the worst when it is unclear.
Make contact unavoidable
Email as copyable text on every page. A visitor who decides to reach out should never have to go looking.
Your own site is a work sample
A slow, broken-on-mobile portfolio is evidence, whatever the case studies claim. This is the one page where performance is part of the argument.
Mistakes that cost the most
A loading animation before the content
Nobody waits to be impressed by a preloader. It is a self-inflicted delay on the only page you need people to stay on.
Twenty projects of mixed quality
A portfolio is judged by its weakest visible piece, not averaged. Six strong projects beat twenty uneven ones.
Scroll-jacking and custom cursors
They break the one interaction people rely on, and on a phone they do nothing except cost download size.
No indication of what you want
Open to work, taking projects, hiring — if the visitor cannot tell, the enquiry does not happen.
Frequently asked questions
How many projects should a portfolio show?
Four to eight, with real depth on two or three. Reviewers rarely get past the third item, so everything after that is only diluting the impression made by the first ones.
Should a developer portfolio have a blog?
It helps if you write about what you actually build, because it demonstrates reasoning that a screenshot cannot. An abandoned blog with three posts from two years ago does the opposite.
Do I need case studies or are screenshots enough?
For freelance and hiring, a short case study wins — the constraint, your decision, the outcome. Three sentences is enough. Screenshots alone prove you were present; they do not prove you decided anything.
Where should a portfolio be hosted?
Anywhere fast and cheap, since a portfolio is almost always static. A static site needs no database, so the entry hosting tier is enough — just check the renewal rate before committing to a long term.
Want this built, not just looked at?
A layout is the easy half. The rest is the build, the hosting it runs on, and the renewal price nobody shows you at signup.