Why a portfolio site?

There are a lot of great courses here on the pdxOpenTech website and if you’re following along you’ve probably made a lot of really cool projects!

Wouldn’t it be great to show off all those projects now that you’ve made them? That’s what this course is going to be about: making a portfolio website that you can use to display all the cool things you have and will be making.

We’re going to do this by guiding you through making a website on Neocities, a Portland-local service that gives you free space to build and share a website.

An understandable question to ask is: why build a website? Why are we not teaching you how to spruce up a social media bio or make a linktree page? There are two major reasons: the first is that if you build your own site it’s yours. Even if you stop using Neocities you’ll have all the code and all the resources to set it back up somewhere else. It can’t get taken from you because a product was shut down or a previously free service started charging.

The second reason is that building your portfolio site is, itself, a way of showing off! If you show that you know enough web design to make even a small site look good you’re demonstrating you have a lot of the basic skills a web developer needs.

With all that being said, let’s start making our site!