Hello,
I finished front end library, and planning to gain experience on upwork as a freelancer, so I prepared a portfolio, and I hope you take a look at it and give me your honest opinion.
Thank you.
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There are 3 things that stand out immediately
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Besides the portfolio itself, which is hosted on Netlify. All the projects look like they are hosted on codepen. Codepen is great to show off fundamental skills or playground projects, but not a great production hosting platform. You will have difficulties finding work if you can’t provide the setup and deployment aspect and you’ll have further problems if you’re using codepen to develop for clients.
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The projects you have shown seem like student projects, not production grade projects someone will pay you for. You’ll need a project to showcase an example of what you can build clients that you plan on targeting. For example a “e-commerce” site or a static site with production grade SEO and performance.
Ask yourself what kind of work you want to try to target and build an example ahead of time.
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The animations are way to slow
It takes a solid 10 seconds to get to the contact information with no way to “jump” past the initial load animation. Your shooting yourself in the foot here with these animations as people are impatient and will not appreciate fancy animations if it means it blocks them from doing what they want to do.
It’s hard to freelance due to competition. Furthermore you must be sure your skills can get past the drag-and-drop tools such as Wix, which is just a few dollars to get a full solution in a few minutes.
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This is very good advice for you, Siraj!
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1 thing to add as you continually work on your portfolio Siraj is you want the user to click one of your socials and actually land on that particular social page. In our industry, I would recommend you start with your LinkedIn where you can also add links to showcase your work, network with recruiters, managers etc… In my ecperience, this is where I landed my first dev role, through the power of LinkedIn. Keep up the great work!
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Thank you, I appreciate your input.
The projects that I have shown are from freecodecamp challenges.
Are you suggesting in your example that I build a sample e-commerce website or an actual one? because, I can make a sample, but if I need an actual e-commerce website then I will need a client first, no?
This is kind of a chicken and the egg scenario. As you can’t build what you aren’t asked to build. That said, from a skills perspective if your current skill set doesn’t stack up against the competition, you will lose to the competition. So if you’ve never made anything similar to an e-commerce website, you wont get jobs to build e-commerce websites when there is competition for a multitude of other people who have built multiple.
If you make a sample of an e-commerce website that has all the bells and whistles working out the box, quote competitively, and provide enough reasoning to pay you instead of paying Shopify for an out of the box solution you’ll have a chance at getting the work.
This is just one example however, another target audience would be a static website with a few bells and whistles for a given small business. In this scenario its more about efficiency as costs for such work would be low, so you’ll need to know how to work within a very tight budget and timeframe, along with find the right clients for the right jobs. As again, something like Wix can do the entire job without any coding. You could even end up using it if you so desire, but that is another skill to “showcase”.
These projects are fine for learning, but do not represent the full scope of work a freelancer could be doing for a given job. They can be useful to show a lower flow of skill, but they will not be enough by themselves to get most jobs due to most jobs requiring a higher level of skills and requirements.
I’d continue to build your skills with freeCodeCamp and build out your portfolio. Stuff like JavaScript and React can help change what you can build to be complex enough to get work that couldn’t be covered by those drag and drop tools.
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I am receiving a Not found message when I click on your portfolio link.
Did you remove it from netlify?
Yes, I will be change some stuff in it.
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