Purpose of Portfolio Website Project
The market demands every web developer/designer have a professional portfolio website that demonstrates their technical abilities as well as contributions to the growing market. The current market hires mainly on skills, portfolio and community involvement (blogging, attending meetups). In 2015, my portfolio website was a one-pager that wasn’t SEO friendly and didn’t demonstrate my full potential for building beautiful websites.
Fast forward to 2018, my technical knowledge and skills have vastly improved and this new website shows my understanding of SEO best practices, responsive design, JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Chart.JS), colour palettes, SVG files, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), WordPress best practices, WordPress API using PHP, and cross-browser testing.
Developed Skills
This was the first WordPress theme I built that wasn’t derived from an existing theme. From my experience with vector graphics, I wanted vector based images (SVG) for logos, social icons general icons for different pages. Google released a new feature for Chrome DevTools called “Audit”, this feature discovered issues for performance, progressive web app, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Audit allowed me to develop stronger skills and understanding of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Since web developers are more for writing code than actual English on a daily basis, I had to think like an SEO specialist and do research on popular keywords and search terms users were using. Google Trends allowed me to understand what were the most popular terms for a particular page. Comparing “design” to “creative” from Canada searches, the design came out on top.
- My first WordPress theme
- SVG files
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Writing metadata (titles and descriptions)
- Google Trends
Technologies & Resources
- WordPress
- SVG
- Bootstrap Material Design
- HTML/CSS
- jQuery
- Chart.JS
- Sublime Text 3
- SketchApp
- Photoshop CC
- Material.io Icons
- Material Design Palette
- SVG Simple Icons
- Privacy Policy and Terms by TermsFeed
- WP Bootstrap Navwalker on Github