Ship a Portfolio Site in an Afternoon

Steps

1. 01Collect the raw specifics first

   Write down, in any order and any quality of prose: three things you have built, what each one does, one hard problem in each, what you would do differently. Do not use AI for this step. It is the only part of the site that cannot be generated, and everything good in the final copy comes from here.

2. 02Pick a template and see it real

   Choose a portfolio template and create a project from it before writing any copy. Seeing your name in a real layout tells you how much text each section actually needs — usually far less than you would write into an empty document.

3. 03Draft the hero in your own voice

   Give the model your raw notes and an explicit ban on the usual vocabulary. Bans work better than positive instructions here, because "write in an authentic voice" means nothing to a language model but "never use the word passionate" is checkable.

   Prompt Copy

   Here are unpolished notes about my work. Write three different one-sentence descriptions of what I do, for the top of a portfolio site.
   
   Rules:
   - Use only facts from my notes. Invent nothing.
   - Banned words: passionate, driven, keen eye, journey, leverage, seamless, cutting-edge, innovative.
   - No sentence may begin with "I am a".
   - Aim for something a specific person would say, not something anyone could say.
   
   NOTES:
   [paste]

4. 04Write the project entries

   For each project, the format that works is: what it does, who it is for, the one interesting problem, and what you would change. Ask for that structure explicitly. The "what I would change" line is the one that signals you can evaluate your own work, and almost nobody includes it.

5. 05Cut it by a third

   Paste the assembled copy back and ask for it 30% shorter with nothing important removed. AI-assisted first drafts are reliably too long. Then read the result aloud — anything you stumble over gets rewritten by hand, not by prompt.

6. 06Publish and get one honest read

   Ship it, then ask one person who does not know your work to tell you what they think you do. If they cannot say it in a sentence, the hero copy is not finished.

If you want to go further

• Add a short case study for your strongest project
• Write a second version of the hero aimed at a different audience and compare

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