I'm in the visual design space which for me includes branding + marketing. I used a one page HTML to showcase my portfolio, give personality, and share what my skill set is. Launched two weeks ago and I'm currently interviewing for Sr. roles at FAANG as a result:
The animated transitions are pretty neat, and were even neater 4 years ago when he first built them, but my favorite part about the site is the way he lays out his whole design philosophy through a number of well-documented projects.
It's missing an about section, but that's because I wanted to experiment with my site, work, and resume speaking for who I am over marketing copy. Affects SEO and likely perception, but I built this recently for a grad school application. If rejected will begin applying for a new job/seek new/clients, and am curious to see how receptive it is then. If it performs poorly then, then a new iteration will be made.
Last note, it's not optimized/built for mobile as of now, so points off for that :/
Ask HN: What are some great personal blogs/portfolios?[1]
This was a question about content, but I would imagine that most answers are also valid to your question.
Honestly, youre better off going to Dribbble or Behance for inspiration. With all due respect to the HN community, the majority of personal websites shown here are very engineer-y, meaning there's a lot of talk about what static site generator they used, and how the HTML was a tight 2kb.
Click the link and you're shown something that would look outdated in 2006. Unless you find a blog relevant to your area, you'll abandon that site fast. Medium.com is getting pretty bad, but even their typography makes me at least stick around to scan the first couple of paras.
In case anyone think I'm joking, no I'm serious. Todays sites have all these flashy useless animation, its hard to find the information you're looking for, takes forever to load, etc. Dennis's page (now memorialized) has been up for decades, the links are all still valid and will continue to be.
http://taylorgood.com