V0: The concept

So I set out to do just that. However, like I suspect many designers or developers do, I got a little caught up in the flashy nature of a website. I could have fun animations to show off those skills! I could have all these fun sections to talk about who I am and what I do! You see where this is going. I love the web as a creative medium and I was getting caught up in scope creep. I am my own worst client.

V1.1: MVP

Ok, so how do you deal with scope creep. You create an MVP, a minimal viable product. I would start with a homepage and work from there.

However, you may see the problem here, the homepage isn’t doing much for me. Other than maybe indicating I at least know what code is, and can put together a few lines of it. Heck - we’re living in the age of AI. I don’t know that I could effectively even prove that I didn’t vibe code that. I’d like to think it’s a little cooler than what AI could come up with, but you catch my drift here.

V1.2: MVP II

So I came up with what seemed to be an interesting solution to the problem. I would just make a landing page for myself! A really basic page with all the high level info I could send off to jobs, all the while working on my main site, and add all the bells and whistles I wanted to add to that - in time. Even better, I’d give it a cute little subdomain: hire.cassigs.com.

The problem…that I wasn’t solving.

Thanks to some amazing blog posts from a friend who is a career coach, I realized I was approaching my resume strategy all wrong. My resume wasn’t telling a story - it wasn’t connecting the dots. It was just a high level overview of what I had done. Which is what my LinkedIn was already doing…which is what my website was doing again. These things weren’t working together to tell the full story of my work. They were just mirrors of each other, giving a cursory overview of my work in three different places.

So I started to think about what problem my website was solving. If a resume or cover letter is a direct pitch to a company telling them how I think I can solve their problems, and LinkedIn is a general gut check to see my full work history or some social proof, my website - like all portfolios at the end of the day - is a way to showcase that work. How do I think about problems, how do I execute solutions. Could I create an MVP of that?

V1.3 MVP (Part III)

While I eventually want to start using my own portfolio as a way to experiment with the web as a creative medium more - I needed to fundamentally solve the problem of structure. And what is the most basic structure I could start with? A portfolio, sure. But this thing is a work in progress. I want a site that can tell a story while having room to grow over time, something I could iterate on.

So I tore everything back, looked around at some portfolio sites I liked, thought about landing page structure - and landed on this.

• [Who am I] - basic hero, links out to a longer about me that can tell a fuller story
• [What problems do I solve] - the portfolio peices, something I could iterate on
• [What are my credentials] - pair down the linkedin part of this, keep it high level - and link out to the rest
• [Social Proof] - If I were offering professional services, I’d add testimonials here, something for a future version, if needed
• [Fun stuff] - Here’s where all the fun stuff I want to add in can go. Blogs, creative experimentation, snippets.

This is a structure I can work with - it gets the information across but is something I can expand on over time. I played around with a few sketches and drafted up a very low-fidelity wireframe on Figma. As I haven’t done a ton of full blown design work, I skipped anything high fidelity. Eventually I realize I could just repurpose what I had already built for my hire site.

Takeaway

As someone who has worked on the web for the better part of a decade, and loves CSS - it’s still easy to forget that at the end of the day the purpose of a website is to solve a problem for someone. How do I make this recipe? What day is my dentist open and how can I pay my bill? Bells and whistles are fun, and I love them - but they need to be secondary to the fundamentals, otherwise the website has lost its thread.