So many have done this before and recently - Coderwall, Collegefeed, and Path.To, just to name the first three that occur to me - but I've never seen portfolio minimalism done so well. It integrates blogs, projects, credentials, and social profiles efficiently and beautifully.
Now, please allow me to change the order of skills without typing them all back in...then put in a Stripe box, shut up and take my money.
Ha! I could have really really used this two days ago. I built my own in HTML/CSS for an interview.
There's a question: how does it sit with people that as a designer and developer, they should be able to (and be proud of) designing and building their own custom portfolio? Isn't the portfolio itself sort of a statement of your skills, and isn't it saying something if you offload that work to someone else?
Your site is beautiful. Really, hands down some great design work.
One thing I find lacking is that I can't see what the end product will look like before I sign up—nor even after I sign up. A screenshot of what exactly you're going to make for me and how it will look would really entice me.
http://hoverboard.io/stavros to see mine, as an example. I got bored after a bit, and figured that adding a portfolio to my personal site/blog would be much, much better, even though it wouldn't look as good.
Wow, this is really great! I really love what you've built. The mobile-friendly layout is a huge plus.
Some off-the-cuff notes for your backlog:
I might suggest overriding the default text selection (::selection) color. I say this because the active state of your fields are blue, and my default OS X highlight color is also blue, so I can't differentiate highlighted text while editing.
Also, it would be fun to quickly link this with twitter and or github to bootstrap a profile, as I found myself going there to compile the basic info about myself.
And like some others here have said ... add a simple premium play that lets me point a domain here and I'd seriously consider abandoning my blog and using this for my own personal domain. I was just thinking this morning that I'd like to redo my site to showcase some of the projects I am working on along with some basic info about myself. This would be perfect for that.
Thanks! Really appreciate the feedback too - annoyingly I don't think it's possible to override the ::selection colour for inputs. I'll keep looking for a solution (that, ideally, doesn't involve changing the blue input field). I've added your notes to my to-do list :)
The only group I don't see this working for is designers- pretty much every designer I've seen has made their own portfolio site and it's a great idea to- it's the one place you can show exactly how you'd make something if you had the freedom.
Hi guys - I'd genuinely love to hear your feedback about Hoverboard. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them either here or (if you prefer) you can email me at dave@hoverboard.io.
Thanks. I emailed you a few glitches and such that I encountered.
This looks really, really nice so far, particularly for its initial release. There are a few things like discovery and analytics which obviously aren't in at this stage...but other than that, it looks much nicer than most of the similar sites that I've seen.
Great product! Beautiful UI, simple & easy to use. One thing though, I'm kinda fill my job board randomly and I don't know how to sort them now (haha). Maybe you can implement auto sort based on date? Really love it by the way.
This being a "portfolio" site, when I click on a project I expect to see multiple screenshots, etc. Instead it's just text. I think if it allowed for a more in-depth treatment of using images per-project, that would be simply fantastic.
Aha, thanks for the kind words. I haven't got plans to allow custom domains just yet - but if there's enough demand (which it sounds like there might be), then I won't rule it out.
Custom domains are a make or break feature for me. Looks like you're hosted on Heroku. You could do this pretty easily by setting up their wildcard subdomains feature and allowing me to pick a subdomain which I can map to my own domain with a cname.
Custom colors and basic styling would be amazing too. I love the look, but now I'm struggling to find a picture that looks nice with blue and turquoise.
Ah - just noticed Firefox doesn't display it in black and white. If you check it out in Chrome/Safari you should see it in black and white (out of interest, which version do you prefer?)
I agree. I wouldn't start using it without being able to pay. blairbeckwith, if you are looking for similar services that are paid, checkout Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com/) and Virb (http://virb.com/). (I don't mean to steal attention away from illdave)
The short answer is it doesn't make money right now, but there are possible alternatives for the future like adding a job board. Hosting is so insanely cheap that the cost of running Hoverboard is incredibly small. And thanks for the UI comment!
To be honest, I wish I could pay for a service like this. One that would respect my privacy. Given the needs of freelancers and consultants, I reason $50 a year is a good price. You have to understand what your product is: a lead generation tool. Those are always worth the money.
This looks really great. I just wanted to point out that the "Write a Post" feature doesn't seem to work. I wrote a test entry and clicked save, it says:
Ahaha, no - the example is Brighton for everyone. I used to live there (although I'm temporarily living in Liverpool at the moment while my girlfriend works on a masters).
I feel bad as it's not my photo, but I couldn't find a suitably high res picture that worked as well. Plus it's fucking old so there's less of a chance the photographer would give a flying fuck.
As mentioned, there are already lots of portfolio tools. However yours is really nice and I love the built in endorsement feature. My one criticism is there's too much branding on each user's portfolio. I wouldn't want the huge green "want a portfolio like this" link at the bottom of my portfolio. The logo link (top left) and "Powered by Hoverboard" link (bottom right) is enough.
BUG?: when uploading images it would be nice if there were some acknowledgement as, on Chrome Mac at least, there is no feed back until save and refresh.
I really like it, great design job.
You might already have thoughts in this direction but I would think about how to benefit from having a lot of devs and designers at the same place, posting blog posts and projects (the first thing that comes to mind is some sort of feeds). Good luck!
Excellent! Beautiful, streamlined, and all the features work really together. Very polished product. One issue, is that my header image clashes with my "tagline." [0] Any way to fix this?
You're right, that does need to be fixed. I've been looking for some simple, elegant solutions to that. I've added a very slight text shadow that helps it stand out a bit better (but I'm still not quite happy about it).
For someone who doesn't want to customize everything and have a quick UI flushed out, its a good showcase for developers. I like the idea I have a hoverboard...
Now, please allow me to change the order of skills without typing them all back in...then put in a Stripe box, shut up and take my money.