[johnp73]

This is a problem I've never really solved in a way that I can live with, so I wanted to see if anyone else has come up with a good solution.

As an HTML developer, how do you build an on-line portfolio for your work?

1) If you link to sites you've done, they will likely be outdated in a few months, sending people to sites that you had nothing to do with (and probably don't want your good name associated with).

2) If you just take screen shots of the final site, employers don't really have anything to judge your coding standards by.

3) If you grab a copy of the site to display yourself, even if it's just a page or two, you could run out of server space fairly quickly if you don't have much room to work with in the first place.

I kind of think that #3 is the best of the poor options, but I'm hoping somebody out there can enlighten me to something obvious that I've not considered.

Peace out - jp

http://www.blamm.com/

[dang65]

Absolutely right. I had a nice little on-line portfolio which referenced 6 sample sites:

Site 1 closed down for about 3 months during funding negotiations - just as I was looking for work and wanted to refer to it.

Site 2 had a technical tutorial I wrote. It became a pay-a-subscription site!

Site 3 was a dotcom I worked for. They laid off a load of developers but carried on trading. The site got more and more out of date (e.g. competitions still up 3-4mths after the closing date). It just looked horrible in the end and about 6mths work had to come off my portfolio.

Site 4 suddenly disappeared when the owner didn't renew the domain name registration.

Site 5 is just a fan site I designed. Quite nice, but nothing special or professional.

Site 6 still works at the time of writing (hooray).

So, I'm seriously thinking of just mocking up a demo site using as many tricks of the trade as I can squeeze in and hosting it myself. Then I can just say, "I used this script in www.Something.com and this design in www.SomethingElse.com etc". If one of those sites happens to still be alive then that's a bit of luck, but I won't be relying on it any more that's for sure.

I don't think prospective employers will be too bothered about where they see your work - on your own site or a commercial site. They can get references if they want to confirm that you worked where you say you did.

[finelineBob]

First of all, recruiters don't have the time to delve all that deeply into each URL you post, so if the site isn't live or is about to die, pull the best from it and turn it into a case study of what you can do. Create a portfolio "thumbnail" page with links to those case studies and/or live URLs and put in a note about what makes that site so special that you want to show it off.

If you only have space for a little bit on content on your own personal space (or even if you have tons o' space) and you've got the hardware (or access to it), burn a CD portfolio and make it available upon request (or, if you REALLY REALLY want that particular job, send it in anyway). Even if your portfolio amounts to 15MB or so, having on a CD is faster and more reliable than a download and one helluva lot cheaper than sending it out on Zip disks. As cheap as CD-R media is getting, who cares if you're wasting the other 630MB of storage or so?