I have been told as feedback from web design jobs I have applied for that I need a stronger portfolio. How many examples do you need in your portfolio for it to be a strong portfolio? Thanks, Kate
"Strong" is a pretty relative term -- you might just need more examples, but you also might need better examples. Artsy fartsy types might think your pages aren't fancy enough; content oriented types might look at fancy graphics heavy stuff and go "it's a big bun, a very big bun, very big fluffy bun"; efficiency experts might laugh at it having more whitespace than content, while accessibility experts might wonder how your designs would gracefully degrade. Generally speaking though, without seeing what you have, it's very hard to say where improvements could be made; at the same time what's good to one person might be trash to another; I know a lot of the people hiring web developers don't know enough on the topic to be, well... hiring developers, and are often more impressed by form over function / flash over substance garbage, no matter how badly their ignorance will bite them in the long term.
I'd suggest you ask them, if possible, what you should have included that would have made you more thick. But, I think it should go without saying that they want a professional who knows what they are about. Maybe not just limited to paper qualifications but on the job experience too. Good content, in my humble opinion, would mean depth and quality.
I personally like your work Kate and good luck! But, most of your work in your portfolio look's just a like, I think that may be the issue. You have to try and switch up your style on different sites. I think doing some freelance work would be a great choice, because you will work with a wide range of clients in different industries and they will require different styles. This will allow you to diversify your portfolio. But, once again, Good luck!
Be warned: BLUNT evil editor response, no offense intended. How very 1990s. Seriously, there's a "Loading" screen? You do realise it's 2014, right? And the picture of a screen that's slapped over the top of the header... what's that there for? And why is the "about me" before the portfolio? And the mud colours? Quite apart from all that, the portfolio items are all horrible. Grievance: a landing page with an "enter site" button? Seriously? Why would I be there if I didn't want to enter the site? Nul points for user comprehension, there. "HomeContact", with two nav items piled on top of each other? Is that Home or Contact or both? White text on half-transparent grey background makes it almost impossible to read. Random capitalised names are dumb. The entire header is massive, making me scroll down to see anything. I don't even want to imagine what it would be like on a mobile device. Inspire ME: text is all over the place, looks like a blog with a free template. Too wide to fit on a standard screen, the massive Twitter bird is right off the side for me. Horrible in-page scrolling makes it hard to navigate. Text is awful, though that's not your problem, really. Web Designer Kate: (the other one) looks like another free blog template. Nothing special at all. Keystage 3: posting your course work is never a good idea. And seriously, a music player? Those died a death fifteen years ago (at least) when designers realised that annoying their visitors was not the ideal way to get business. Again, far too simple and dull to be in a professional portfolio. So, enough of the negativity... what to do? Trawl around the net and find a couple of pro designers. Look at their portfolios. At the very least, check out the current state of web design, as it appears your knowledge is 15-20 years out of date. Even free WordPress themes look better than your portfolio and, well, they're free. Off the top of my head, look at places with different goals: Wyatt-Clarke & Jones for a pro photo agency (wyattclarkejones.com), Copyblogger for a writing site (copyblogger.com) and anywhere that comes up on a Google search for "cool web site designs" (with a 2014 date) - I particularly liked benthebodyguard.com or www.loungelizard.com for artsy-fartsy designs or www.onedaywithoutgoogle.org as a clean, texty layout. Basically, you need to get your head out of the classroom and into the real world. It won't be easy - design never is - and you'll need to decide what you do best. Are you an artsy type or are you like deathshadow, a tech-head with a hatred of everything inefficient and dumbass-stupid? There's room for all sorts in web design, but (to be frank) your current designs look worse than stuff I would do... and I'm a writer, not a designer. Hope it helps, even though it may hurt. As I said, no offense intended at all.
@TIEro -- I think we're going to be friends... Looking at your site, there are a number of issues right out of the gate. As @TIEro mentioned the loading screen nonsense and scripttardery on the page is a definite no-no... You've got illegibile color contrasts on your headings, goofy illegible web fonts (serif fonts are for print, not screen), you're using PX measurements on all your fonts, you don't reset the line-heights when changing font sizes (leading to overlap and legibility issues as well), you've got complete gibberish numbered heading orders, multiple H1 in a non-5 document, attributes like TARGET that have no business on ANY website written after 1997, double-breaks doing padding's job, endless pointless div for nothings, run-on sentences of inline-level tags where you should have lists, presentational classes like "center" and gibberish/meaningless classes like "slide4", incomplete form (no fieldset or even block level container inside FORM), multiple stylesheets doing the job of one... I could go on for quite a while. ... and that layout? WAY too much whitespace, you're shoving all the important stuff (like the actual portfolio links and contact) below the fold, and wasting a massive amount of screen space to deliver a mere 498 bytes of plaintext. The social icons seem just thrown in any old way, I've no idea what that 'monitor' picture is or has to do with anything -- thought it overlapping certain elements at certain widths doesn't look good. Even the first line of code proudly proclaims much of your issues -- to borrow from Admiral Ackbar, It's a trap. At the very least you should be using a RECOMMENDATION doctype (at the same time I would advise against the train wreck of stupidity known as HTML 5) since transitional quite literally means "in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices". Tranny exists for people using HTML 3.2 sites to be able to toss the additions from HTML 4 on top of it, and was NEVER -- I REPEAT NEVER meant for the creation of new websites! The sites in your portfolio are similarly flawed, "Grievance" for example as @TIEro pointed out with the stupid malfing splash screen -- that isn't even attractive thanks to the massive background image (that's too large filesize wise to even be part of a website) tiling in an ugly fashion -- has no business on a modern website; splash pages being on pretty much every "how not to build a website" list of A DECADE AGO. Even under the hood the splash screen is a wreck what with the anchor wrapping a DIV. Unless you're using HTML 5 (which I advise against) putting a block-level tag (like div or P or H1) inside an inline-level one (like A or SPAN) is completely invalid gibberish! (note I'm saying "level" -- that's HTML levels, which is NOT the same thing as CSS "display", even if they do correspond to the default behaviors) The menu again has illegible color contrasts, the layout isn't elastic since again you used px metric fonts, again another background image WAY too massive to have any business on a website in the first place, the text is hard to read thanks to the transparency (almost always a bad idea under flow text unless the opacity is DAMNED high) and serif fonts on screen... and of course wiht the menu and footer you've got images doing plaintext's job, resulting in zero accessibility or graceful degradation. Under the hood on the main part of the site, JS for nothing, images doing plaintext's job, clearing DIV like it's still 2001, no headings whatsoever when there are quite obviously at least two headings present... Since you're a "web design student" have they actually taught you HTML/CSS? As in have they taught you why we have numbered headings and how to use them properly? Semantic markup? Accessibility guidelines like the WCAG? Colour contrasts? Emissive colourspace? It looks like they haven't. Overall I think you need a firmer grasp of HTML, specifically semantic markup and logical document structure... as well as a grasp of accessibility minimums, elastic semi-fluid responsive layout (yes, all three at the same time), and maximum utility of space. I'm in the middle of a project right now, but I'll try to revisit this thread to explain all those to you. I can probably teach you more in one post than 4 years of some college filled with teachers who aren't qualified to flap their gums on the subject ever could. Honestly if that's what they were teaching you, I'd sue for my tuition back. ...but again, like a lot of "grey matter" IT professionals (aka ages 40 and up) I consider that piece of paper from 'higher education' to not even be worth a sheet of bog roll.
As an interesting and amusing (to me) aside, I remember teaching business people not to use click-through splash screens in 1995 or 1996. The example site I used was IBM or someone like that, whose first page consisted of a 1Mb image... in the days when 90%+ of people only had a 56k modem connection. It's neither here nor there, but it should give the oldies like me a smile.
Wow, somebody using the term 'aside' properly -- unlike say... most of the nitwit's who are hopping on the HTML 5 bandwagon to sleaze out code any old way 1997 style and then have the massive brass pair to call 'semantic'; since the way most people are using it as a tag it might as well be <CENTER>