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Daniel Giraldo
13,396 PointsWould love some feedback on my personal website!
Hi there,
Iām looking to land my first Front End gig and I really want to be able to impress potential employers. So, I was wondering If you could take a minute to check out my personal website and give me some feedback on the design and overall user experience.
Thanks :)
1 Answer
Bogdan Lalu
6,419 PointsI think it's pretty nice man, congrats!
I like your design idea as in making it look like and IDE with project files etc. What I was thinking when browsing the site is that specialists working in the field will understand what you did there, but recruiters (HR people) aren't that likely to see the connection. Keep in mid that they they are often the people who screen applications or have contact with you first. If you're not targeting these guys at all then you're good! In the 'work' section I recommend that you also include thumbnail pictures showing some visually appealing elements form your projects. Not only that this will to make it look a bit more commercial but it will also break the repetitive pattern on that page. Can you tell me what technology you used to make the query string k unique every time the link is accessed? That looks like something very useful against bots. Fun facts is pretty cool. I like the sort of call to action 'Let's get a drink'. I would do some sort of vertical align : middle. Moving it up will make it a bit more visible, if you'd like that. The main area where you show the content of your page shows horizontal and vertical scroll bars on all 4 tabs. Is that intended/ unavoidable?
Daniel Giraldo
13,396 PointsDaniel Giraldo
13,396 PointsFirst of all thank you very much for the well thought and detailed feedback. It is very helpful! And also I'm glad you like it.
When I was coming up with design ideas to redesign my already existing website (this is like the 4th time I redo my site from scratch. It seems to be a endless cycle haha) I was a bit worried about the issue you brought up - many of the recruiters are HR people and they might in fact not see the connection. However, after looking at about 100 different personal portfolios online, I realized that a lot of these sites follow a very similar design (actually I found about 5 that had exactly the same design. Literally the only thing that changed was the font and the colors). So, it was here when I decided to risk it and go with a more 'original' idea. Another reason I thought it was ok to take this risk was that after going through several interviews and not finding success, I noticed that for a Front End development role interviewers don't seem to be as concerned with the design of the projects, as they are with the functionality and performance of the site. Which kind of makes sense, considering they might already have a web designer on onboard. In any case, I thought going with the IDE theme would allow me to integrate some cool functionality to the site (like the random greeting, the random fact and the button to change between a dark and light theme) and at the same time gain more experience working with REACT. Hope I'm not completely off here! Now I just gotta cross my fingers and hope it gets noticed! :)
I think your feedback about the 'work' page is actually great! I initially thought about integrating some sort of graphics about each of the projects, but thought this might make the page too crowded. But, I think thumbnails would work just fine and I could even alternate the alignment on each of the segments to make it flow even better!
As for the query string k in all of the routes I'm using React Router's Hash history, you can read more about it here. Basically what it does is that it allows the site to maintain 'location state' in the browser, without the need to configure the routes in a server.
I'm currently looking for ways to fix the scroll bars in the main content area. Although I haven't fully tested, it seems as if this issue occurs in Windows machines. I've tested in most browsers for apple devices and this doesn't happen, so it might be some sort of configuration of windows browsers? The reason the scroll bar shows up is because I set up the content in that main area as
overflow: scroll;. I'm hoping there's some way I can fix this cause I find it really annoying. Could you tell me what browser and operating system you used to view the site?Again, thanks very much for your feedback and I apologize for the super long response! Let me know if I can help you in any way with the React Router.