Building a Portfolio Website

This is the homepage of my portfolio website where I showcase the projects and skills I have been developing during my time at university. Creating this website allowed me to organise my work in one place and present it professionally to potential collaborators and employers.

When doing research on projects I should do to further what I am currently learning in university, one thing that always came up in every video I watched and article I read was to build a portfolio website. The reason for this is that a portfolio website is an excellent way to showcase projects you have done and information about you all in one place.

I knew the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript from completing the Introduction to WWW Programming (INFO 1601) course at the UWI. Using that knowledge, I began creating my website. I watched YouTube tutorial videos and browsed others' portfolio websites for inspiration. One of the portfolios I came across was Ryan Montgomery's, an ethical hacker I follow, which gave me the idea to use interactive particles on my home page.

I looked up how to replicate this and found Vincent Garreau's particles.js, a lightweight JavaScript library for creating particles, and implemented it into my website.

I am using Blogger from Google to host my blog, as it is free and easy to use for both creating and updating blog posts.

As my site is a static one, I did not want to pay for hosting as there are many viable free options for hosting static websites. It was a choice between Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages for me, and I went with Cloudflare. I picked them because of the ease of integration with my domain, which I purchased there, and updating its DNS records, and it also integrates with GitHub repositories like GitHub pages.

My website contains a contact form, but HTML does not support email forwarding, and if I wanted to use PHP, for example, to forward emails, I would not be able to host it on Cloudflare or GitHub pages. When looking for a solution for this, I discovered form handling services which process form submissions for static websites, allowing you to collect user data without needing a server-side scripting language like PHP.  There were many options, but in the end, I went with Web3Forms because they had everything the other services had, plus they allow you to redirect users to your own thank you page for free, which is something I could not find in the other services I looked at.

Having completed my portfolio website, it has increased my knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.