Building a User Friendly Web Portfolio

Recently we’ve been working on updating our clients page, which required us to think, for the first time in a while, “what do people want from a clients page?”.

Our first thought as developers was to start bashing out lengthy case studies documenting the finer points of Drupal Commerce configuration and Apache Solr setups, but then we remembered we weren’t writing them for our benefit and went back to the drawing board.

We looked at some other sites to see what they did well, and came up with a list of things we thought new customers were likely to want to see from a portfolio:

• Attractive presentation of sites
• Evidence of technical capability – but no jargon!
• Information presented in a concise manner.
• Links to the sites – if you’ve got confidence in your service, showcase it!

For us, presenting the sites attractively required careful thought. There’s nothing worse than a page full of ropey screenshots, and we were keen as always to emphasise the importance of our responsive design capabilities. Here’s what we did:

A brilliant tool called ‘Am I Responsive’ (http://ami.responsivedesign.is/) turned out to be perfect for the job, enabling us to quickly create images of our sites mocked up on a variety devices.

For technical information, we restricted ourselves to just a few bullet points about each project, looking to write roughly 200 words on each.

We also provided some tags to enable users to filter our client projects depending on what kind of service we had provided, which hopefully should help to get across our versatility as a company.

We’re not so naïve as to think it’s perfect, but it’s definitely better than what we had before. It hasn’t necessarily got the wow factor of some you’ll see but we we’re hoping its very practical on most devices, which image-heavy pages such as a portfolio often aren’t. If you’ve seen anything you like or don’t like about it, leave us a comment – we don’t bite!