Making a portfolio website without writing any code

The usual route to a portfolio site has about eight steps in it, and only one of them is about your work. Pick a framework, find a template, register a domain, point the records, set up hosting, work out the build, deploy, then discover the phone layout is broken. Most people stop somewhere around the domain and the page never exists.

Removing those steps is the whole design of the builder here.

What you actually do

• Choose a design. The gallery holds 22 complete pages across 6 directions, filtered along the top. Open any card and it fills the screen at desktop or phone width, with arrows to walk the set.
• Check the builder. Fill it from the résumé you already have. Correct what is wrong, switch off what does not belong.
• Look at the page. The real page opens over the builder, at both widths.
• Publish. Type a handle, press publish, save the edit key.

That is four things, and one of them is reading. The walkthrough goes through each step as the product runs it.

What you do not do

No framework, no template repository, no build step, no deploy. No hosting account and no domain to register, because publishing claims an address of the form this site's domain followed by your handle. No responsive work, because each design is authored at both widths and Preview & publish renders the real page at each of them.

There is also no theme editor, which is a deliberate absence. A theme editor is how a hand-built page becomes a slightly worse page over an hour of adjustment. The 22 designs are complete rather than configurable, and the decision available to you is which one, not which shade.

What "authored design" means here

Each of the designs is a page somebody built by hand for a particular kind of work, which is why engineering pages and design pages start from different filters: Grey Drift is an atmospheric monochrome field, Studio Quiet Builder a quiet builder studio, The Wire one line of light, Queuewell a kinetic queue board. They are not one layout with six colour schemes. The gallery renders each one as the page it is, so the card you are looking at is the thing you are choosing.

Five of them are marked signature, described in the gallery as the five we would pick first: Grey Drift, Otherhand Scroll, Studio Quiet Builder, Disney Cinematic Classic and The Drawings. The whole set is browsable at portfolio designs without starting anything.

Where your material comes from

From the résumé, if you have one in this browser: the portfolio builder fills from it when you choose Fill from my résumé, and shows you what it read before anything lands on the page. If you do not, choose Start typing and fill it in by hand. Either way the entries are yours and nothing writes them for you.

Everything you make is kept in this browser rather than on a server, which is why none of this needs an account, publishing included.

The one thing publishing asks for

An address, and nothing else. Publishing then shows an edit key and a recovery code; save both. Before that point the page is private and noindexed, which the sheet also states. Choosing the address is the only part worth thinking about in advance.

What this cannot do

It cannot replace the résumé in a formal process, which is a question of its own. It cannot give you a custom domain, and it cannot give you a layout nobody else has, because the designs are shared. If either of those is the point for you, a site you build yourself is the right answer and the eight steps are the price. For most people the trade is the other way round: a hand-built page that exists this evening beats a custom one that exists in principle.

It also does not write your entries, add projects you have not done, or have any view on whether the page gets you work. What it removes is the part between having the material and having a page, which is where the evenings went.

The evening this is competing with

It is worth being honest about what a hand-built site gives you that this does not: a domain of your own, a layout nobody else has, and control over every detail. Those are real, and for some people they are the point.

What they cost shows up on the fourth evening rather than the first. A site you build is a site you maintain: a dependency update, a certificate, a broken build eighteen months later when you need to change one line before an interview. The trade here is that the page is simpler than the one you would build and it will still be there, unchanged and working, the next time you want to edit an entry.