My portfolio website - please review?

egans88

Hey guys,

Just wondering if ye could take a look at my portfolio site, and let me know what you think!

www.seaneganwebdesign.com

The site is intended for employers as I'm looking for work in web design or development.
I'm still trying to get my foot on the very steep freelance ladder too and so with this in mind I created a pricelist area here so I would love to hear some feedback about this too and whether you feel its appropriate or not for a portfolio site?:)

Any other ideas or opinions would be very much appreciated.

Cheers!

Overflow

I see so many times people trying to get into this game and fail and I feel at the moment with your current standard of work and your website, you are not going to get very far.

Firstly your website is completely unoriginal and plain, its says nothing about you as a designer. I believe you just used a wordpress template. How do you think that sells yourself as a designer to potential employers when you cant even be bothered to design your own website ?

Secondly all your designs look very amateurish and rough. You should spend some time getting up to speed with the latest web design trends. As it is at the moment, i cant imagine any design firm hiring you with your current portfolio. Just keep designing and firing out designs in photoshop and converting them to xhtml.

A simple google search will throw up some resources regarding design trends:

http://webdesignledger.com/tips/web-design-trends-in-2011
http://webdesignledger.com/tips/web-design-trends-for-2010
http://www.themeflash.com/80-beautiful-web-design-trends-of-minimal-site/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/05/web-design-trends-for-2010/

p

Are you a designer looking for a job, or a company looking for clients. Right now it's doing a bit of both, and badly. Pick one direction and do it well.

Also, overall your designs are not very good, they're capable but i'd be looking for much better, and unless you want to be paid peanuts you need to narrow your focus and improve in those specific areas.

Sean^DCT4

ok I am going to tone this reply down a little as you are only starting out in your career.

You list a lot of skills on your "About Me" page, yet they are clearly below average. You are advertising web design and use a very generic off the shelf Wordpress template.

You are advertising that you create

clean, stylish and modern websites

yet I do not get this impression from your site and therefore your work.

As a previous poster has mentioned, try to focus on a particular area and improve your skill-set.

The web design/development/SEO market is saturated with this level of incompetence and clear lack of talent.

egans88

Thanks for the feedback and especially the links 'Overflow', they are very interesting and quite disheartening.

I am very aware that I am by means anywhere close to the standard needed to be a successful web designer YET. In my defence I will say I have only finished doing a quite vague multimedia degree so I have pretty much set out on my own with regards web design and have been doing so for under a year and I think I have actually learnt alot in that space of time.

I wonder what other skills I should fouces on to start out (apart from html and css) as it is quite confusing and daunting with the amount of languages and skills needed to succeed?

Thanks again

Overflow

Thats fair enough, just focus on one area and keep practicing. If its design your into, work on your photoshop skills, draw inspiration from the links i sent you. Also here is a great site with lots of tutorials to help get your photoshop skills up to par:

http://psd.tutsplus.com/page/2/?s=website

If its more of the development side your into, you will need a good understanding of CSS, HTML and Javascript.
Pick a server side language, i would suggest ASP.NET MVC or Ruby on Rails, both are very easy to pick up and get started with. Pick one and stick with it, you dont need to learn them all.

ASP.NET MVC:
http://www.asp.net/mvc

Ruby on Rails:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

silurian1980

All the comments above are fair but don't be disheartened, keep at it and if your desire to be a good designer or developer (not both) is really there then you will succeed!

Good luck man!