Designing a site when…

Designing a portfolio when you have little time

The before

Just like that. Before I realized it I was out of a job. I realized right then the weight of what that means. How do I pay my mortgage? How do I tell my wife? The zinger came when I finally realized, oh crap! I don’t even have a site up!

I had relied on the fact that I was happy. I was content at my job and was damn good at it. Never did I think I would need to update my portfolio and or build a site let alone so quickly. Being me I had to remember some big key steps…

1) The biggest key is to stay flexible and positive.

This was all I could muster between the job applying, interviewing and doing tests for various companies.

OOOOH AHHHH …. pretty lame right? The problem I ran into was … what do I show?

Animation? Bootstrap? Parallax? straight HTML? Pictures of my dogs? What I knew was that I am a good coder/designer. That I needed to keep that in mind. Don’t lose sight of who you are and what you can do. I decided on things I was good at. One was designing. The other was chicken enchiladas.

2) Design it on paper first! 

I did about 1 – 2 hours of rough layouts and designs, really trying to plan out the look and feel of my website. What I wanted to show, how I wanted it to work, where it needed to be to compete for jobs out there.

I even went so far to create wireframes and a quick pdf guide to keep me on point

I knew I wanted to show responsiveness, every job I was applying for was really asking for and wondering how to showcase mobile-friendly websites to reach more customers.

3) The end or is it?

So where did I end up? I did find some freelance, and some contract work, keeping positive and letting people experience your energy was a big reason for these experiences. Also being grateful and humble helps appreciate what you have and whom you have.

But now I am back, back out in the world looking.At least this time I have a prettier page to assist in my search. Still not 100% complete but neither was the death star. #hanshotfirst.

and since I mentioned it before, pics of my dogs.

Thanks for reading!

– Kyle