As a senior frontend web developer with over 25 years of professional experience, I constantly keep learning, udating my web development skills and my professional profiles. It seems I cant' repeat and repost often enough:
Ingo Steinke is a Berlin-based, creative, frontend-focused, freelance Senior Web Developer and certified Shopware Developer with more than 25 years of professional experience.
Accessibility, responsive web design, React, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, PHP are among Ingo Steinke's expertise as a Senior Web Developer.
Professional portfolio profiles on platforms differ in wording and word frequency partially due to structure and fixed headlines and properties like skill, availability, active, verified. On-page, different sub-pages focus on different aspects of my work, skill, and personality. Here is an overview of three different word clouds, halfway through my content update.
Words like web, website, web developer (Webentwickler, Web-Entwickler), websites, frontend, React, Shopware, performance, my name, and even frequent dates like 2025 dominate different sections of my portfolio pages.
My updated profile/portfolio website as a web developer has four main pages:
- contact, home (teaser overview, former one-page portfolio)
- skills, services, offers and benefits
- projects and testimonials
- about me
About me, but for a different Audience?
By the way: if you love this post's cover image, let me disappoint you: my website is more colorful and more professional than this nerdy collage. But if you love intermediate views, overlays, and artful experiments, check out my other DEV posts, as there might be something for you.
Adding Content without Losing Sight
Additional pages with detailed information, like case studies about specific projects, benefits for certain target groups, like accessibility, sustainability and legacy maintenance, specific skills like being a certified Shopware developer, and a landing page as a freelance web developer based in Berlin are a sort of bridge head to add even more verbose content if that helps to get visibility and reach out to more potential customers as a web developer.
I found it helpful to zoom out and make a sitemap of screeshots that looks a bit like what I expect a designer shows me in Figma or XD when designing a new website.
There are some more sub- and landing pages, PDF downloads, and everything both in English and German. My overview is like a design system, focusing on different types of modules and layouts.
The Art of Omission and Deletion
Marketing and keyword matching is more than shooting at a moving target. It's also a game of taboo: don't use the wrong words in the wrong place lest you dilute your focus and send the wrong signals!
Words that must not be written include software that senior developers like to mock, but also words with double meanings or past projects tech stacks that sound too hobbyist or outdated from a modern professional perspective. Speaking of legacy traces, when was the last time you thoroughly checked your LinkedIn and other public profiles? When you google your name and examine beyond the top results, do you like what you see? Is that still you?
Misleading Profile Previews
Double-checking my external profiles revealed not only outdated details but also funny quirks like the category Freelancer » art, culture and media » writers and poets that I landed in somehow. Profile previews can be misleading: in a private incognito window, LinkedIn shows only shows a very short excerpt of my profile description, so we must optimize the first few words here and use the banner image to show additional information.
Social media profiles, articles like this one, posting on Linkedin, Substack notes, Instagram, and freelancermap might help marketing, so here we go. I will keep posting more valuable content for fellow developers in 2026, I promise!
Marketing for Developers
I can't rewrite my life, but I can reword its story. I can emphasize professional expertise and experience, repeat relevant keywords and omit those that tend to attract the wrong clientele.
Skill, Joy, and Effort
I'm a creative developer. I love people and they like my communication and documentation skills. I can code, and coding is a skill that includes structuring ideas and finding the right words and and expressions. Still, it's an extra effort to prompt, negotiate with customers and customer support, or write marketing copy. Still, I'm a developer who enjoys the focus and flow of coding in the zone of my thoughts.
Looking forward to Refactoring
I love being creative with words and ideas, and I love being creative with code. I imagine refactoring my script and style files, writing tests and TypeScript, will feel like a welcome change to long hours of overdue SEO optimization. Well, ask me again in a few weeks from now, and I might tell a different story.
Constantly Refactoring my refactored Website
As I already said, updating my portfolio website is a constant process with minor and major updates, and I have been doing it before.
The biggest major update to my website, several years ago, took me three months, reflecting my new ambition as a self-employed freelancer, keeping up with modern and accessible web design and development.
I refactor to innovate, facilitate, and clean up tech debt, and I refactor to update, improve and extend content, to add images and try out new CSS features like a broader choice of colors or apply findings and suggestions by new audits and inspections, to improve accessibility, usability and search engine optimization.
Contact me if your team needs a senior web developer in Berlin or remote!
Comment if you agree, disagree or have an angle to add!
Top comments (1)
Thanks, Ingo, this is a great and very important marketing post ;-)