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title: 'BUILDING A PORTFOLIO WEBSITE: WHAT I LEARNED AND MY EXPERIENCE'

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# BUILDING A PORTFOLIO WEBSITE: WHAT I LEARNED AND MY EXPERIENCE
**Introduction**
    As a developer, knowing how to build and design a website is good, but also knowing how to market your skills is very crucial because that is what will get you far in this highly competitive field. For the developer, a portfolio website serves as a liasion between a potential client/employer and the developer. 

**What is a Portfolio Website?** this is a personal or professional website that highlights your work, abilities, and expertise as a developer or a worker. It functions as an online portfolio or résumé that shows prospective employers, clients, or partners what you are capable of.
A portfolio website is important because it serves as your online showcase, enabling you to visually showcase your best work, abilities, and experience to prospective clients, employers, or partners. This clearly demonstrates your capabilities beyond a resume and provides you with a professional platform to draw in new business. 
One of the importance of having a portfolio website, is that its contents speaks for you even in your absence. It showcases your work, skills, professionalism and also make you easily accessible through the click of an online link. 

As an aspiring developer, it is good practice for me to begin building my portfolio website so as to enable me keep proper records of all my progress. Potential clients/employers can also use it to track my professional growth and skills. 

**Learning Process:** 
Learning is a continous process and for an aspiring developer, it is very essential that you keep practicing and learning over and over so as to master the skills. While working on building a portfolio  website, I realized that the first step to getting it right, is by understanding what to code using the basic html elements. Once the html is wrong, the CSS won't be able to do proper styling and the project itself will look disorganized and unprofessional. I encountered many hurdles because I was unable to place certain html elements in their right places for me to achieve the standard I wanted. In must cases, I had to debug the HTML elements in order to get the CSS to respond to my command. 

I was able to overcome this barrier by making researches on those difficult areas and browsing the internet for more information on how to do it. 
The HTML concept or element that was must useful to me in the course of working on my project, was the div tag (`<div></div>`). The <div> tag is used as a container for HTML elements. That is, it defines a division or a section in an HTML document. The `<div> `class provides clarity and better understanding. Another HTML element that was of use is the` <a></a>`(anchor tag/element). This provide links to other resources and webpages that may not be displayed in the present web page. 

For the CSS, the helpful concept to me is the display: flex; This is a value of the display property that enables the flexible layout model for arranging the elements in a container. When you can apply the display: flex; to the container element, it can become the flex container and its direct children become the flex items. This layout model allows you to distribute the space within the container efficiently and align the flex items in various ways. Another important CSS concept is the padding. Padding is basically used for defining the space between the element and the border of the element. In other words, CSS padding properties are used to generate space around an element's content, inside of any defined borders. 
    
**Features of my portfolio website**
My Portfolio website contains features such as: 
* Home: this is my landing page. It gives a general overview of what my website is all about. 

* About me: this gives a brief background about me, such as my education, my family background, my work experience and so forth. 
    
* Resume: this is a summary of everything about me as an individual, incuding schooling, work experience and skills. It captures every aspect of my development. 
    
*  Services: this talks about my work and the kind of services I am able to provide to the client/potential employer. 
    
* Projects: talks about those projects I have embarked upon either as an individual or in a group. 
    
* My Blog: this basically talks about my personal interest and things I do at my spare time. 

* Contact: my portfolio website will not be complete without my contact information so that people interested in my skills and services can reach out to me at any time. 

    While styling my HTML, i provided a Div container `<div class="container">`to hold all the elements in the body part of the html. This helped in containing the elements so they don't over-ride each other. Also, I used the nav element to contain all my `<a href></a>`which are links to my information. For the CSS, using class to name the different elements, made it easier for me to call on the element when styling using the CSS. 
    My portfoilo website is unique because it describes me as a person and my capabilities which includes multi-tasking and getting work done on time and correctly. My website is still a work in progress, meaning that i am striving to make it the best it can be and also building on my skills so as to have more opportunities. 

**Reflection and Improvements:**
    Reflecting back on the project, I think that my biggest challenge was the fact that i focused more on meeting the deadline of submission, rather than findings other ways of doing certain things differently but correctly. Despite this challenges, I think I was able to do justice to the project to the best of my ability especially in the HTML coding part of the project. I would improve on my text presentation and spacing ability more if given the time, and also learn how to style imagines properly. 
    The next step for me in web development is to continue to give it my best shot and always go back to the basics for proper understanding and to take it one step at a time. 
    
**Conclusion:** My experience in building this project was enlightening because I got to know certain things in the course of my research. It allowed me to experiment with different things and also learn from some of my mistakes. It has helped my understanding of the usage of some of the HTML elements and styling techniques using the CSS which were initally difficult for me to comprehend. 

I hope to incorporate these knowledege learned in HTML and CSS into JavaScript and other advanced features and make the best of the experience and opportunity. 