The best sites for building your UX/UI portfolio

When creating your portfolio, there’s a tradeoff between methods that are:

• Flexible yet difficult
• Limited yet easier

We’ll take a look at 5 top options along this spectrum:

You can read through, or skip around as you’d like:

1. Hand-coded
2. Webflow
3. Framer
4. Semplice
5. Notion

Hand-coded

Hand-coding your portfolio gives you ultimate flexibility in how you display everything.

If you’re not a developer yourself, there are still a few ways to end up with a custom-coded portfolio:

1. Can you trade a developer custom design on their project for their custom coding your portfolio?
2. Are you otherwise interested in learning to code?

For me, I was slinging CSS far before I had any sense of design, so it was a natural choice for my portfolio:

My take: the most flexible option. Even if you don’t code, it’s worth considering if you could hire/trade with someone who does.

Webflow

Webflow is a no-code website builder with a large community.

Portfolio sites are a core use-case, and they even have a 21-day build your portfolio in Webflow course (recommended by Webflow employee and Learn UI Design student John Ramos – along with their templates).

If you’re already proficient in Webflow, then this becomes an amazing option – e.g. developer Grace Walker created her totally fresh portfolio in one day 🤯

But if you could create your portfolio in one day with Webflow, you might not be reading this article 😉. For the rest of us, a portfolio could be a great excuse to learn Webflow.

My take: a top-tier no-code editor. If learning Webflow would be a boon to your career, building your portfolio in it is a great first project 👍

Get started: https://webflow.com/

Framer

Similar to Webflow, Framer is a no-code site design tool that excels at making portfolios.

Basically everything that’s true of the former is true of the latter 🤷‍♂️

(Also: worth checking out the 600+ portfolio templates for Framer)

My take: a top-tier no-code editor. If learning Framer would be a boon to your career, building your portfolio in it is a great first project 👍

Get started: https://www.framer.com/

Semplice

Semplice is a Wordpress plugin that turns Wordpress into a beautiful, high-powered portfolio-creating machine 💪

They brand on being by designers, for designers.

And despite being a no-code, drag-and-drop editor, you can create some pretty remarkable stuff with Semplice:

My take: I’ve never used it, but I’ve long been impressed from a distance. If you have experience with using Semplice, please let me know 🙂

Get started: https://www.semplice.com/

Notion

This uber-clean document management app can be used for a bare-bones portfolio.

Buuuuut because it makes all the visual design decisions for you, you’re going to have to stand out in other ways.

(⚠ And remember: bad visual design is one of the most common portfolio mistakes).

Nonetheless, it works:

You don’t need to code, you hardly need to design – just add your case studies into a gallery view of subpages, and you’ve already got a makeshift portfolio 👍

Do check out templates and best practices.

My take: good if you need a portfolio yesterday and aren’t interested in code or no-code options

Get started: https://notion.so/

Now, that about wraps it up.

This has been a huge series – over 8,000 words and dozens of examples. So if you’ve read this far, I can only say you will also want to read my series on 30 Ways to Spice Up Your Portfolio.

Here’s the link for that 👇👇👇