A portfolio does not need six months and a developer. It needs one clear decision, a folder of finished work and a weekend where you resist redesigning the logo five times. The plan below fits the whole thing into a Saturday and a Sunday. The boring parts — platform choice, image sizes, page structure — get handled first, so the actual building moves quickly.

Friday evening: decide what the site is for

Give this twenty minutes, not a week. Write one sentence: I want to be hired as a [role] by [kind of client]. For example: "I want to be hired as an editorial illustrator by magazine art directors." Or: "I want to be hired as a furniture maker by interior designers working on hospitality projects."

That sentence decides almost everything else. It tells you which six projects belong at the top of the home page, how formal the writing should sound, and whether you need a shop at all. Skip it and you will build a gallery that appeals to nobody in particular — the most common reason a decent portfolio sits unvisited.

Choosing a platform in under an hour

Two questions narrow the field: how often will you update the site, and do you need to sell work or share it privately with clients? Then pick from the routes below. Be honest about your appetite for maintenance.

• Hosted site builders (Squarespace, Format, Cargo, Wix and similar) — templates that already look decent, hosting included, a monthly fee. The sensible choice for most people doing this in a weekend.
• Portfolio networks (Behance, Adobe Portfolio, Dribbble) — free or cheap and fast, but your work sits beside everybody else's and the design is not yours.
• Self-hosted (WordPress, Kirby, a static site) — the most control, plus hosting, updates and backups to look after. Only wise this weekend if you have done it before.
• No-code builders (Webflow, Framer) — excellent once you know them; a poor place to learn under time pressure.

Pick the one you can finish, not the one you admire. Then buy a domain: your name, short, no hyphens. A .co.uk address reads well to British clients and is straightforward to register. Set up an email address on the same domain and use it on the site — a matching address looks more professional than a personal one.

Saturday morning: structure before style

Most portfolios need four pages. Anything beyond that is optional.

• Home — one line saying what you do and who for, three to six of your strongest projects, then a contact link.
• Work — an index of projects. Each one gets its own page or lightbox with four to eight images and a short caption.
• About — a photograph of you, a paragraph in plain English, selected clients or employers, your location, and whether you are taking on work.
• Contact — your email written as text, not only a form, plus the one social profile you actually use. Forms can fail quietly; an address cannot.

Write this structure in a plain document before you touch the site builder: page name, headline, body copy, image list. Half a page of text per page is plenty. Sorting out the words now stops you fiddling with fonts at midnight.

Saturday afternoon: choose and prepare the work

Edit down, then edit again

Twenty projects is an archive; six to ten is a portfolio. Keep the pieces that look like the work you want more of, cut anything that no longer represents you, and put the strongest piece first. If two projects say the same thing, keep one.

Prepare the images properly

Export at roughly 1600 to 2000 pixels on the long edge, save as JPEG at a moderate quality, and convert to sRGB so colours hold up across screens. Crop consistently — a mix of wild aspect ratios makes an index look untidy. Name files after the work (thornbury-poster-01.jpg) rather than your camera's numbering; those names feed into alt text and search results.

Write captions that do a job

Two or three sentences per project: what it was, who it was for, what you did. "Identity and packaging for a Bristol coffee roaster, 2024. I drew the wordmark and designed four bags." That tells a stranger everything. "Just a little something I made" tells them nothing.

Sunday morning: build

Start with a template you like and resist customising it. Get real content in first; design decisions are far easier once the pages are full.

1. Set the site title, a simple type-based logo, and two colours plus a neutral — sampled from one of your images so everything ties together.
2. Create the pages from your Saturday document and paste the copy in.
3. Upload the work in the order you decided, then add captions and alt text.
4. Set the navigation, a footer with your email, and a simple 404 page.
5. Look at the whole thing on a phone, then on a laptop. Fix what breaks.

Sunday afternoon: the polish pass and launch

Budget two hours for this and do not skip it. Most weak portfolios are not badly designed; they are simply untested.

• Click every link. Send yourself a test message through the contact form.
• Walk the site on a phone, on mobile data, in daylight. Check that buttons are big enough to tap and text is readable without pinching.
• Read the copy aloud. Typos in your own job title are more common than you would think.
• Write a page title and a short description for each page — this is what appears in search results and shared links.
• Add alt text to every image, check contrast, and make sure nothing important is conveyed by colour alone.
• Remove every placeholder, empty page and "coming soon" panel.

Then publish. Send the link to five people who will actually reply, and post one project with the link attached. If you collect email addresses or run analytics, check the current guidance on privacy notices and consent before switching anything on.

After the weekend: keep it alive

A portfolio is not a monument. Put twenty minutes in the diary once a month to check for broken links, add one new project each quarter, and remove the weakest as you go. A live site with eight good pieces will win you more work than the flawless rebuild you keep postponing. Leave yourself a note about what you would improve next — a proper case study, better photography, a services page — and tackle that in a month, not tonight.

Photo: stephiejo / Pixabay