Building my portfolio - thoughts and feedback welcome

Hi all, I am almost done with all the projects (got the last two full stack ones left). In the process, I have been assembling all my projects into a rather bland-ish portfolio and I unfortunately have the creative eye of a fruit fly , could someone help me by giving me some ideas to make my portfolio a little more , say appealing, … for a lack of a better word,

Edit Version 2- 02/2018
I completely re-did it with only react (no bootstrap) , as usual, any feedback in terms of content , design or function is most welcome.
I have also issues with the images loading real slow, any help in that regard is also welcome.

Portfolio V1 : https://dereje1.github.io/personal-portfolio-webpage/
Portfolio V2: https://dereje1.github.io/portfolio-v2/

The first thing I thought of was COLOR! The black is nice and the yellow gives it a nice pop, but combined with the grays and muted whites it looks more bland than sleek. The nav black and the black background are also different colors and the rgb offset kinda kills the uniformity. My suggestion would be to change the background color of your main content, do away with the bottom borders (it makes the site look a bit boxy), and let the content speak for itself.

Second, at initial load, all of your content looks crammed to the bottom. Maybe move your hero text closer to the center of the image.

The card animations are great, but the card itself doesn’t have much styling. Give it some margins or padding, lighten up the background color and eliminate the list-style-type.

Overall it looks like a great project, and congrats on getting so far in FCC!

1 Like

appreciate the constructive help @jordanchristie, i’ll try to implement those changes

Animation on your text ‘Dereje’s freeCodeCamp Portfolio’ is way too ‘static’, what I mean is that it moves with the same speed (?). I would suggest using this library and use either fadeInDownBig or bounceInDown animation instead.

@michal9909 do you mean it is too slow? I can speed up the cycle , I think I have it @ 5s

So I added a few of the changes per the recommendations, but without overhauling the whole damn thing I don’t see how I can make this thing look appealing. It the same design I had since I started fcc and I just kept on piling stuff into it. In essence I need a simple but effective design, easier said than done…

Here is my second attempt,
https://dereje1.github.io/portfolio-v2/

I completely re-did it with only react (no bootstrap) , as usual, any feedback in terms of content , design or function is most welcome.
I have also issues with the images loading real slow, any help in that regard is also welcome.

Much improved man! A little feedback.

The cards are a little close at the first viewport expansion (if you’re doing mobile first, the last if you’re going the graceful degradation route). Make your smallest media query a little larger so when it switches to 2 cards per row, there’s a bit more space.

The primary focus skills portion actually seems a bit unnecessary since you already mentioned all of those skills in the project section.

Also, try speeding your animation up for the section dropdown and add the same animation transition to the unselected element. That will prevent the div from snapping shut like it’s doing now and give you a snappier and more fluid UI.

Solid stuff though, and again, a huge improvement on the first iteration.

1 Like

Finally got around to applying your recommendations @jordanchristie , thanks again for the feedback