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Portfolio Review

Nicole Saunders 💻🌹 on September 26, 2018

Hello. Just got done with the second version of my portfolio. I'd love some feedback on it. I think it's pretty good but I'd love to hear different opinions. Would you change anything? Thanks a bunch!

http://nicolejsaunders.com

Guillaume Martigny • Sep 27 '18

Hello Nicole,
Try to run LightHouse (embed in Chrome console) and address the issues.

The main issue I had with you site is loading time. Your images are too heavy. Try crop them to the exact size you display them and run them through tinyPng/tinyJpg. You can also use the free caching of CloudFlare.

Next thing is, you're not using HTTPS. It can be harder to achieve depending on your hosting. But today's browser warn user when entering non-secure website.

Last (but don't have to be least), you didn't have set a favicon. Recruiters bookmarking your site won't have the nice little icon reminding them what your site looks like.

Overall, good design (nitpick: not sure about some contrasts). Parallax effect is always a nice touch and I like that you don't have too much informations.

Keep on the good work ;)

Nicole Saunders 💻🌹 • Sep 27 '18

Thanks! I’ll definitely look into these things 😊

Ben Halpern • Sep 26 '18

I love the overall design. I want to comment on some details:

I think you should use a custom font, perhaps from Google Fonts or elsewhere. It will make things look more sophisticated.
I love everything about the top header except the line height on the main text as well as the size of the image. It takes too long to load and should be optimized.
On that note, the whole site should be optimized. If possible you should look to minify your CSS etc. and serve it through a CDN.
I think the About Me section should have more padding and a max width, perhaps around 600px and center it that way.
I think the tools/skills badges should be smaller, and maybe have an outline/rounded colors. Think iPhone app icons as inspiration.
There are a few other small touches to stare at and just try to beautify a bit.

Some of the discussion from this thread could prove helpful for all of this:

How to become a designer?

Defman

#discuss#help#design

Overall this looks great and it's just the details that need to be gardened!

PS you should put your DEV Profile in the footer along with Codepen and GitHub!!

Nicole Saunders 💻🌹 • Sep 26 '18

Thank you! Definitely some great points! On your third point about optimization I'm not sure what that means. I know CDN is Content Delivery...? lol.

Ben Halpern • Sep 26 '18

Basically, you want to "minify" your CSS and JavaScript to end up with fewer bytes being sent to the user. A CDN is a type of hosting that helps the files get to the end user faster as well.

Don't stress yourself too much with this, but if you look into this you'll probably learn a lot in the process.