Personal website best practices

I know many of us are in the process of building and sharing our personal portfolios. There are great resources through FCC on good coding practices. But what best practices should we use when hosting our personal portfolio?

I was searching around for some answers when I found Google’s webmaster guidelines. This seems like the gold standard for setting up a quality site. And then I found this cool tool Varvy for checking some of the common qualities.

I wanted to share these resources because 1. I’ll bet that companies evaluating at candidates look not only at projects, but also the site they’re hosted on. In fact, that’s probably the 1st thing they’ll see 2. With all the learning I’ve been doing, I’ve seen very little info on how to structure, build, and deploy a proper site. Hopefully this is helpful to other FCCers and I’d love to hear what else you all are learning/doing on the topic

These links are purely for SEO it seems

I’m not so sure. Hiring managers don’t have a whole lot of time on their hands and you’re rarely the only candidate. Apparently, your resume only has about 6 seconds to impress, so it seems strange that they would go poking around your website to check its SEO power level. But, I’ve never hired anyone, so what do I know?

That’s a huge topic that’s not necessarily applicable to your personal portfolio. If you use CodePen or GitHub pages, you don’t have to worry about anything of the sort. I’ve had some (small) server admin experience before starting fCC, so I was able to get hosting on Digital Ocean quickly, but I’m still learning as I switched from a basic Apache server to a slightly more complicated nginx setup that acts as both a server for static files and a proxy server for my node apps. You’ll have to learn a bit about firewalls, HTTP, network security, and a deeper understanding of whichever operating system you’ll be running. This is totally doable, just factor that in when thinking about how long you want to spend on freeCodeCamp.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I’ve heard that the initial screen is just a couple of seconds. If they are making a hiring decision though, you’d think they would take a close look at your code to check your code quality. For a front-end developer, that should include these things.

Here’s how I’m reading Google’s guidelines: These are things that you should do for your site to make it secure and accessible and by the way it helps with SEO. I didn’t know most of this stuff and I’ve been learning for more than a year. You just don’t see a lot of info about it. Here’s some of the things I mean:

  • Configuring the viewport for a mobile layout
  • Securing your site’s communication with HTTPs
  • Declaring a language, filling out alt links
  • Optimizing images and minifying css/js
  • Setting server to send appropriate http response headers
  • Enabling browser caching and file compression

You can use Codepen or GitHub Pages to host static content, but as far as I know you can’t connect a database. Heroku seems convenient to deploy apps without having to worry about some of these things but as soon as you want the server to stay awake and support SSL on a custom domain you’re paying north of $30 a month.

You might be right, this could be overkill but I was just surprised that with all the learning I’ve been doing, hardly anything touched on these topics. Thanks again.