How I built my portfolio on Medium.com

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This episode is a guest post and part of a series called Portfolio Principles. In this series, I help people to build a more effective portfolio.

This week may be a little special. Responsible for the words you’re reading right now isn’t Martijn van den Broeck as usual, it’s me, Marc Wieland.

I was reading Martijn’s publication “Portfolio Principles” since the very beginning. First, it was an influential source, later it transformed into a guideline for my personal portfolio. Today, I want to share with you how I took my first steps towards my personal portfolio.

Portfolio Principles was an influential source first, later it transformed into a guideline for my personal portfolio.

For a long time, all my portfolio displayed was a countdown. To make sure the timer didn’t show 00:00:00 someday, I had to set a new random launch time once in a while (shame on me). Every time, when I changed my launch date, I was presented with the ugly truth, that I hadn’t worked on my portfolio for a long time. This couldn’t be a permanent situation. A portfolio isn’t meant to be a countdown. It has to tell something about my personality and inform the viewer. A countdown can’t do this. One of the most useless things you can do is to show counting numbers on your page, especially when they randomly change and don’t stick to a date.

A portfolio isn’t meant to be a countdown.

About a month ago, I added an event to my personal calendar, which was named “Launch Portfolio”. It was dated to the 19. April 2016 at 24.00. I promised myself that I would hold onto this date no matter what.

I was planning to completely design and code my portfolio from scratch. However I quickly realized, that the time frame I gave myself wasn’t enough to create a portfolio, that could satisfy me. I needed a plan to reach my goal until my deadline. While thinking of a solution, one of Martijn’s articles came to my mind. Why not create a portfolio on Medium?

I decided to create my personal portfolio in two steps (by the way, it’s still a work in progress):

  1. Create a publication on Medium and use it as a portfolio.
  2. Design and code a custom portfolio from scratch.

Following this two steps gives me more time to 1.) focus on the content and 2.) build my custom website from scratch. The benefit of the shown solution is that I get my portfolio running even quicker. With Medium, it’s possible to bootstrap an early version of my portfolio really fast in a way, which resonates with my vision of quality.

Content is king, that’s especially important for portfolios. It’s very easy to shift toward a more design-centered approach. The design isn’t our first goal and that’s what I like about Medium. The platform forces us to center on content.

Content is king. The design isn’t our first goal.

Medium includes a great editor. It’s distraction-free, easy to use and cross-device compatible, which means I can write my stories anywhere. On my phone, tablet or desktop. After I wrote down the content into the editor, it’s ready to go live. When we publish an article, we don’t have to think about how our story will be presented. Medium makes sure that the content is displayed perfectly on all devices.

To have my Medium Portfolio ready for my personal deadline, I decided to prepare 3 articles plus an “about me” text. By minimizing the amount of text to write, I tried to keep the quality as high as possible. I’m not an experienced writer, so this task kept me busy for some time.

By minimizing the amount of text to write, I tried to keep the quality as high as possible.

Medium is a young and rapidly changing platform, which means that the staff members are adding and tweaking features quite often. The publication feature, for example, received some updates just recently. It’s now possible to customize the look of a Medium Publication even further. It’s perfect to get a little more personal appearance into the portfolio. You’re allowed to add a custom color, logo, banner and for sure a custom icon to the publication. You can even map the publication to your own domain.

I personally think, that using Medium as a portfolio is no abuse of a feature, maybe it’s an unusual idea, but it’s absolutely fine to do. So I’m feeling very confident to share my Medium Portfolio with other people.

Using Medium as a portfolio is no abuse of a feature, it might be an unusual idea, but it’s absolutely fine to do.

After the publication was customized and ready, I published all prepared articles. Because I use the feature “custom domain”, my Medium Portfolio is now reachable at my own domain. If you type in my top-level domain, you will be redirected to medium.marcwieland.name, which is the URL of the Medium Publication. When my custom-built portfolio is ready, I can just remove the redirection to Medium and my own portfolio creation will be up and running.

At the beginning, we probably have a hard time creating a strong audience on our custom portfolio. Medium might help us a little in this area. A lot of people are using Medium every day, which increases the possibility to get more viewers and build an audience. On Medium, people can recommend your content, they also can respond to your writing and start a discussion. This makes it easier for us to get in touch with our readers and learn from them.

Medium isn’t just a reading platform, it’s also very social.

While my publication is online on Medium, I can work out the design and code of my custom portfolio without worries. Because I still write my content on Medium, I can use a content first approach while building my custom portfolio. This is always great and should also be your goal when creating your portfolio.