The internet made communication more faster and accessible than ever. Sharing with a global audience is instantaneous. It’s possible for people to share their world. People can also make a living offering services through the internet to a wider market. Most people look for a better rate that they would normally get from their local offers. This makes the Internet a competitive marketplace and marketing yourself in unique ways is vital to make yourself visible.
Social media as a portfolio?
Social media platforms allow users to reach new audiences and clients. However, that’s a side effect of their popularity. Engagement is their key priority. Endless rolling updates keep users busy and unaware of the time they’ve lost. They don’t want users to leave. And you’d be foolish to use your social media accounts as a primary showcase. Social media platforms are manipulative and can shut down accounts without explanations. You would lose all your content and connections because of a false flag or report bombing on your account. As it stands, you just curate your social media for the first impressions and recent updates.
Why social media isn’t a portfolio?
Most platforms may offer posting link updates. They, however, may get lost in the waves of posts from users around the world. At least, they’ll allow an external link on your account. Users cannot customize many aspects of their profile. An online portfolio highlighting skills, milestones, experience, and achievements makes it easier to communicate the complete picture.
Why do you need a portfolio?
You have something concrete to follow up on enquiries about your skills and projects. Interweb is abundant with static web page templates. Multiple web hosting companies host static websites for free. If you’re a little more technically inclined, or want to extend your skill sets, static website generators offer more flexibility. Web development architecture, like Jamstack, adds a world of dynamic features to static websites. They are perfect for personal use as a portfolio, blog, single page websites. These differ from traditional blog and micro websites, which limits what you can do.
Where to host your portfolio for free?
GitHub, GitLab, Heroku, CloudFlare, Netlify, Vercel, Replit are some platforms that let you host static websites for free. Most let you connect to a domain and some even offer CDN (content delivery network) throughout the world. All of that for free. Update HTML/CSS template with simple find/replace. Change designs and colors with the help of a browser developer tool. Update the changes you make to the source files. Understanding static page generators will have a slight learning curve. Once you’ve learned what sections you need to change, you can make it reflect your vision. The internet is full of tutorials and solutions for web development. If you hit a roadblock, we can fix them with a simple search. When you start a search, look for links leading to StackOverflow, GitHub, and Reddit, as they have discussions about solutions to what most encounter.
Once your portfolio website is up, link all your other social media and important links there for clients to contact you. Set up a git repository for your portfolio, so you can mirror it on additional git hosting services like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. Let the journey begin and Good Luck!
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