February 2025
Service Design
In Progress! Check back soon!
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Based on what I’ve read and otherwise gathered over the last few years, it is this: every single person has strong feelings about the design portfolio. When I first started mine, the main question was: “should a portfolio even be required?” Now that question has evolved to: “Does the design portfolio meet visual design heuristics and do the case studies go a good job at telling a story?”
Things have changed a lot just in the last year or so. The rise and decline of the UX job market has seen the debate shift but the underlying themes remain the same: show your work and prove you can be a valuable addition to a great team!
At the end of my UX Certification program @ Georgia Tech, we were given some advice about how to move forward with our first portfolio: your first portfolio won’t be your best and that’s okay.
Depending on what sort of role we were looking for, we were either encouraged to code a portfolio from scratch and host it ourselves OR choose a content management system (CMS) and build one out using one of the no code tools available.
The thought of coding a portfolio from scratch seemed daunting, especially since I wanted to be able to focus more on research and design rather than development. As a result I decided to take the CMS route but I still didn’t feel totally confident with the decision until a few weeks later.
There is no shortage of CMS platforms available today. At the beginning of 2021 when I was building the first iteration of my portfolio, there were about five super popular ones: Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Weebly and GoDaddy - among others.
I tried Squarespace, WordPress and Wix and strongly disliked all of them; they lacked the freedom that code affords with design. As a result, I decided to keep looking for alternatives and thankfully found Webflow!
Webflow is a browser-based website building and hosting application specifically for responsive websites using media queries and JavaScript.
In my own words: Webflow feels like a code-driven prototyping tool for building websites. It helps to build coding proficiency using all of the same HTML and CSS principles that designers are familair with while saving a lot of time with debugging and polishing code.
When it comes to writing code, I am no expert. I tend to be able to figure things out with some research and patience but it takes some time due to the learning curve experienced by even some of the best software engineers. Moving forward, using Webflow to continuously update my portfolio over the coming years seemed like a great way to keep coding skills at the forefront of my skillset.
The ‘Learn, Do” framework states that learning only goes so far - doing is what really helps solidify learned information. After my UX program, using Webflow seemed like a great additional way to practice the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript principles I learned.
A great way of monitoring portfolio success is via quantitative data: analytics and tracking. An important feature of a potential CMS was to be able to easily connect Google Analytics and a personal domain to the site; Webflow made both of these extremely easy.
Regardless of what tool I ended up selecting, I knew there would be some sort of learning curve. I wanted to make sure there was somewhat of a community (tutorials, recommendations, etc) surrounding the tool I chose. Webflow has its own in-house program for teaching: Webflow University.
Webflow University offers a few ‘courses’ which are series of videos that cover everything from coding principles to visual design best practices. The videos are spectacular and helped me get started with overcoming the learning curve of a new tool.
Community is important to unlocking the best features of the best tools; Webflow has a fantastic community of users. Since Webflow is built for designers, they collect ideas from designers for potential new features: a great way to boost engagement and also get amazing feedback on their product.
Webflow Wishlist is a forum where users can propose new features or vote on features that other users have proposed. I’ve voted on a few features such as: a CMS Slider, Custom Breakpoints, Multi-select elements and more. At times, there have been limitations but seeing that other users face the same limitations is valuable.
Lastly, it was vital that a potential CMS was a true CMS - ideal for hosting a blog or keeping a collection or projects; ideally it would allow for multiple collection lists. Webflow met and exceeded this criteria. It offers a specific CMS plan that allows users to have multiple customizable collection lists.
Technical issues happen. I wasn’t aware of this at first, but Webflow has a dedicated status page that updates with specific issues users may be encountering. The site is updated in real time and provides valuable feedback as to why users may be encountering difficulties.
It is now May, 2023 and I’m still using Webflow to host my portfolio; I’m currently working on the second major iteration of it. It has been a spectacular tool and one that has gotten even more popular in the past few months.
In addition to being a great product, Webflow is a company I would love to be a part of in the future. When asked in interviews what products I love, I usually list Webflow as one of them!
