How I Built My Portfolio Website
From design choices to the tech stack, here’s a quick walkthrough of how I approached building my portfolio: picking the right framework, leaning into animations, and keeping content authoring simple.
When I started working on my portfolio website, my main goal was to make something that truly felt authentic, welcoming, and fun, while still keeping my projects and writing at the center. I wanted it to be easy to share my journey and reflect my personality. .
To get inspired, I looked at other developers’ websites, sketched a few ideas, and played around with colors until I found a style that matched my vibe. After some research, I chose tools that I could grow with over time.
For building the site itself, I used Next.js which is a framework that makes it easier to organize and create pages. For the design, I went with Tailwind CSS, which let me quickly experiment with layouts, spacing, and colors. Instead of a complicated blogging system, I used MDX, which allows me to write posts in plain text and even include code or interactive elements whenever I want.
I keep all my code on GitHub so I can track changes and share how the project evolves. The site itself is hosted on GitHub Pages, which makes publishing updates quick and free. To ensure the site loads fast and works smoothly everywhere, I use Cloudflare for the domain and as a content delivery network.
To make the site feel more alive, I added small animations like smooth button transitions and fade in headings. I also made sure it looks great on both computers and phones. Accessibility was very important to me, so I checked color contrasts, added descriptive text for images, and tested navigation with just a keyboard. Before launching, I ran Google Lighthouse audits to make sure the site was fast and followed best practices.
I built the site using Cursor it is an AI-powered coding editor, and for animations and UI elements I relied on ui.aceternity.com and animate-ui.com. For fonts, I used Google Fonts. On the homepage, I featured a photo of San Francisco’s downtown, since I live in the Bay Area. The image was taken by Mauro Lima and comes from Unsplash.
The site is still a work in progress. I plan to add more features, improve accessibility, and experiment with new design ideas. But building it has already been a huge learning adventure. My hope is that sharing this process will encourage other students and early-career developers to create something of their own start small, experiment, and most importantly, make it personal.