Ship a portfolio in a weekend

The reason most portfolios never ship is not the build. It is that people start with the build, hit the content, and stall for four months.

Invert it.

Saturday morning — write, do not design

Open a plain text file. For each project, write four things: what it was, what you did, what changed because of it, and one sentence you would actually say out loud about it.

Six projects is plenty. Four is fine. If you cannot write the four things, the project does not go on the site.

Then write the one paragraph that says who you are and what you want next. That paragraph is the hardest thing on the site and it is 60 words.

Saturday afternoon — pick images

One hero image per project, one supporting image at most. Crop them to the same two aspect ratios. Resist the urge to show the process; nobody outside your studio has ever been persuaded by a mood board.

Convert everything to WebP at around 2000px on the long edge. That is the whole image pipeline.

Sunday morning — install and fill

Install the theme, then do nothing but replace content. No colour changes, no spacing changes, no new sections. Fill every field the theme asks for, including the ones you think are unnecessary.

This is the step people skip, and it is the step that tells you whether the theme fits.

Sunday afternoon — three changes, then stop

Now you are allowed to design, and only three things:

1. The accent colour.
2. The display typeface, if the default genuinely fights your work.
3. The order of the sections.

Three changes is not a limitation, it is a budget. Everything beyond it is a fourth month.

Sunday evening — deploy

An Astro build is a folder of static files. Push the repository, point Cloudflare Pages or Netlify at it, set the build command and the output directory, and add your domain.

Then close the laptop. The version you did not ship is worth nothing, and the version you shipped can be edited on Tuesday.