So I’ve been coding for about a week now (give or take). I gotta say I enjoy the process, but I’m struggling with the front-end development portion. I’m about as uncreative as they come. I feel like I could sort of copy a template, and make it my own, but from scratch is sort of a nightmare!
Needless to say, I’m excited for the back-end portion of my learning.
My question is this: How did you guys go about doing your personal portfolio page?! I’m looking at some examples of other people’s work, and some are WOW. Did you utilize any other websites/courses to get your portfolio page looking great? I feel a tad unequipped with the information given to me at FreeCodeCamp alone, but again, that just might be my lack of creativity.
Go out of your way to make it as ugly as possible. Make everything ugly. You have better things to do with your time than fuss over design (which is what designers should get paid for, anyways). You’re a developer, so focus on behavior. There may come a time when you feel capable of making something purdy, but until then just go with “crime against humanity” level of eyesore. Some people even get paid to do this to us, so maybe you’ll find a niche for yourself.
You’re not wrong to feel “unequipped”, as you say. It’s hard for any program to teach you everything you need to know to make whiz-bang websites, but the goal of fCC is to create developers. What you’ve done so far is just an introduction, but it’s continually getting better. It will be a help to both you and the community if you can think about what gaps you have in your knowledge and put it into questions you can ask here on the forums. You will get answers here, and they will be searchable to everyone else who is starting off. You’ll also be practicing an essential skill for programming by taking an ill-formed problem (“I don’t know what to do here and I’m scared”) and creating a well-formed problem (“I need to know how to center this image on tablet to desktop sizes and full-width on mobile devices”).
Keep at it. Try out CodeAcademy and KhanAcademy as well. Search YouTube. Ask questions here. Learning to program is like anything else worth doing - frustrating, overwhelming, and immensely satisfying.
In addition to what @PortableStick said, after you have created your webpage, ask folks for feedback. People here are relatively good about not only critiquing your work, but guiding you to fixing it.