Hi, I've been doing PHP programming for the last 5-6 years, and I've decided to look for some programming work. But first I want to build up a portfolio of things I've made. I'm looking for some suggestions on what to make to show off my skills. It must be more focused around the back-end as I'm better as developing then designing. Thanks, CLM
There are many ways out there to showcase your portfolio. First and foremost is to create a WordPress based website (with your name) and use some minimal portfolio templates that are available on themeforest. You can also try out free themes. Just make sure that your portfolio looks good and to drive more leads you can generate landing pages as well. It's much easy to create landing pages using WordPress plugins. To get free themes & plugins I will suggest you to go to the WordPress website. Free themes - https://wordpress.org/themes/ Free plugins - https://wordpress.org/plugins/
Uhm. What in the world does Wordpress templating have to do with building a PHP portfolio? My suggestion would be that yes, having a PHP-based personal webpage is good, but a better approach for showing off actual PHP-skills is to build a Github-profile, and upload the projects you think best. This way you can show off your actual skills, you can also join in other projects and build your own forks of known projects. It shows off your coding skills, and if you make something that is actually useful, it might also show that you can attend to a proper user-experience.
More than a portfolio website you need to get your skills out there, github, post solutions on forums, take hacker earth tests or my personal favorite launch mini websites you make over a weekend. I made a commitment myself to launch a mini-site which will invole networking every month. This month I launched goavibe.com which is a website about my Hometown of Goa, India. Its a simple blog built with AngularJs, Parse.com (and minimal php for seo), Being a backend coder myself, I wanted to learn a UI framework. The best part about all this is, to my surprise, once we launched the site 4 days ago two clients contacted me for building their sites.