Holy smokes, it's 2012. Step onto any train or bus and you'll find yourself surrounded by a crowd of people, quietly fixated on little, glowing screens. In the last year alone, mobile web traffic has gone up 35% globally - and you don't have to look far to see it. A quick check of Google Analytics a few months ago made that point ever-so-clear: a whopping 25% of my total web traffic is mobile. That's 1 in 4 people! And my site looks like crap on the phone. Well, that is, until now. Go ahead, resize your browser. I re-did the entire thing so it looks nice at any scale. How? Well, honestly, I sorta cheated. I'm secretly a web nerd who used an amazing responsive-layout CSS boilerplate called Skeleton, a side project of my friend Dave Gamache, which made it easy for me to design & code for every screen size. Now, if you're not a web nerd, and find yourself thinking "responsive B-S-wha?", you're in luck - there are a few of options out there that make it easy to build your own mobile-friendly portfolio without knowing a lick of code.
Here's a few general rules to follow when choosing a portfolio site.
- Avoid Flash portfolios! They require a plug-in that most mobile phones don't have. Plus, they're sooo last decade.
- Keep the design simple. The site should take a back seat to your content, and should easily scale down to fit within a tiny screen.
- Quality, not quantity. Fewer & big is better than many & small.
- Ask yourself "Is it easy to get from one image to another?" If you find yourself clicking or tapping too much, the answer is probably no.
- Vertical scrolling is faster than horizontal scrolling. Unless the mobile version of the site supports a gallery mode that lets you swipe left & right, stick with what the browser knows how to do best - up & down.
I found 5 mobile-friendly portfolio options that fit this criteria fairly well:
1. Super Skeleton Wordpress Theme2. Hatch Wordpress Theme3. 22Slides4. 4ormat5. FolioHD
Hopefully, the next time you're casually chatting about your work, you'll have something to show at the dinner table. These five are the best i've found so far. If you know of any others, let me know in the comments.