How to build a Software Developer Portfolio – Layout Design

Creating a design can be an inspirational moment of genius or a complete flop. Being someone that understand’s color and design this might be your kryptonite. In the previous blog post, we talked about choosing a tech stack, and how technical individuals like to get stuck in looking for the best option on choosing a technology. The same could be said about those that understand design this could be where you end up getting stuck.

The goal for your portfolio is to help you find new clients. – Rick H.

Keeping our goal on top of mind, I’m not going to be going into the micro details of choosing colors, creating a brand, and identifying your why? I’m going to leave this up to you to explore. The purpose of your portfolio is to get you new clients and in order to get new clients, we need a way for clients to reach out to us. How will clients find you? I started to cover this on the high-level strategy post we will get back to this but for the time being, we need a way for us to capture someone that is interested in our services and this all starts with your portfolio.

You have to provide enough value in your portfolio for someone that is interested in your services will want to hand over their private information. This might sound like something that is trivial but it’s not. Most people want to shop around and self-educate as much as possible before they decide that they need to hire a professional. Your job is to make this decision as easy as possible for them.

Instead of waiting around for someone to contact you and get you going on their project we are going to be doing things a bit different. You want to be active, not reactive to new clients. You don’t want the client to tell you what to do, by the way, this is why they are hiring you it’s because it’s something that they can’t do on their own. You never want to come from a place of despair or desire for their business instead you want to come from a place that you are there to serve.

All of this starts with your portfolio, what I’m going to share with you would have worked in 1999 or this year it’s all the same. The takeaway here is not to get bogged down in the details of small trivial decisions such as design or development. You want to remain focused on the outcome, this is why we are going to go with the following layout for the portfolio.

Here is what each part of the portfolio is going to be doing in order for us to generate new leads for possible client work.

What can you do for me? This is what most people get wrong, the main headline! You would be surprised how little thought is given to creating a headline. To create a headline that works you want to keep in mind what you can do for your clients. The better you know your clients the better headline that you will be able to create. I’m not going to go into how to create a headline that attracts new possible clients. If you want to learn more about headlines read this blog post — How to write a headline that converts.

You are going to want your headline to be above the fold and state clearly in plain English exactly what you can do. You want the headline to be no longer than 2 paragraphs, this headline has to “sell” the individual to keep reading your portfolio. It’s tricky, but if you can get this right you are almost half way done.

Show don’t tell examples: Here is where your portfolio items are going to go, but what I want you to keep in mind here is not to go and start doing a complete memory dump of every single part of the project and how awesome you were with lambda expressions and C# instead I want you to focus on what this project that you completed did for the organization. Did it improve productivity? Did you launch a new project? Did it help automate a process? Did you create a new revenue stream for the company? Whatever result that you delivered to your client you want to present it here.

AVOID AT ALL COST TELLING, INSTEAD SHOW IT -Rick H.

Past Clients: I don’t want to be the one to tell you this but it all starts with who knows you not who you know. This is why it’s important that you show off and express your attitude towards your past’s clients. You are doing high paid consulting work with organizations that are doing amazing work, it’s your job to tell the entire world about it.

If you are in a position of not working with amazing people fire all of them and go back to step 1. -Rick H

Testimonials: This is KEY! You really want to pay attention here. If you have testimonials or even better video testimonials from your past clients this is the place that you want to show them off. It’s 10x easier to land new clients if you have a room full of people that can vouch for your work. I can not stress enough how important this part is. Remember the goal of the portfolio is to get someone comfortable enough to share their name, email, and phone number. Testimonials are a BIG part of the equation, you do not want to skip this part.

Services: Sharing what services you offer is not as important as testimonials but if you know that you offer something very specific you might want to display this here. For example one of the things that we offer is creating applications using the MEAN Stack here is where you might want to mention any of this information.

Capturing Leads: The last part is putting all of it together and get started generating new leads. You want to have a call to action button in all possible locations on the page where a new client can click on and get dropped into a form that prompts them for their personal information. I’m focusing specifically on getting there name, email and phone number but for you, this might be different. Since I sell a high ticket consulting service, I need to get on the phone as soon as possible with the new client.

In the next one, we are going to get our hands dirty and start laying out the template with WordPress.

Till next time,

Rick H.