Building My First Portfolio Site

I've been meaning to put together a personal site for a while now. Not something flashy — just a clean, simple place to collect my work and write about things I'm learning. This post is about how I approached it and what I ended up with.

Keeping It Simple

The first decision was to skip frameworks entirely. No React, no static site generators, no build step. Just HTML and CSS opened directly in the browser. It turns out you can get surprisingly far with just that.

I looked at a few sites I admire for their simplicity — the kind of pages that load instantly and let the content speak for itself. Text-forward design, restrained colors, generous whitespace. That became the target.

What I Learned

CSS has come a long way. Flexbox handles the layout needs for a site like this without any hacks. A single media query gets the responsive behavior working on phones. The CSS-only mobile menu toggle (using a hidden checkbox) was a fun trick to figure out.

The best design decisions are the ones you don't make — fewer choices means fewer things that can go wrong.

The portfolio section uses a simple card layout that's easy to duplicate. Each card has space for an image and a text description. Adding a new project is just copying a block of HTML and swapping in the details.

Next Steps

I still need to fill in actual project screenshots, write a proper bio, and add a few more blog posts. But the structure is there, and that was the hard part. Everything else is just content.

If you're thinking about building your own site, I'd recommend starting this way. You can always add complexity later, but it's much harder to take it away.