Look at your portfolio like a client scanning it for thirty seconds
Before you touch the course material, it helps to see your own site the way a stranger sees it. This page walks through a short exercise you can run today, using nothing but your existing portfolio and a notepad.
Why thirty seconds matters
Most visitors decide whether to keep reading a portfolio within the first half minute. They are not reading every case study top to bottom. They are scanning headlines, glancing at images, and forming a quick impression of whether you solve the kind of problem they have.
That means the words above the fold, the order of your projects, and the first sentence of each case study carry a disproportionate amount of weight. This teardown exercise focuses attention on exactly those spots.
Five things to check, in order
Cover your homepage headline with your hand
Read everything else on the page first: images, project titles, navigation labels. Then reveal the headline last. Does it match the impression the rest of the page already gave you, or does it feel disconnected from what you're actually showing?
Read only the first line of each case study
Ignore the images for a moment. Read just the opening sentence of every project description. Do those sentences, read together, tell a consistent story about what kind of work you do? Or do they read like five unrelated captions?
Count how many words describe outcome versus output
Go through one case study and mark every sentence that describes what was made ("a five page site," "a mobile app") versus what changed as a result ("reduced signup drop off," "made onboarding easier to follow"). Most portfolios lean heavily toward output.
Check whether a stranger could describe your specialty
Ask someone outside your field to read your homepage for one minute, then describe out loud what you do and who you do it for. Their answer, however imprecise, will tell you a lot about what is actually landing.
Look at your contact page as if you were nervous
Imagine you are a hesitant potential client, unsure if you can afford this. Does the contact page feel approachable, or does it feel like the final step of an intimidating process? Small wording choices here matter more than most people expect.
Where this connects to the course
If this short exercise surfaced more issues than you expected, that's fairly common. The Portfolio as Narrative module in the full course builds directly on this same reviewing habit, then walks through rebuilding case studies step by step rather than leaving you with just a list of problems.
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