How I Built My Developer Portfolio Website (and What I Learned About SEO

As developers, we often focus on building things for others—but building something for yourself is just as important. In this post, I’ll walk you through how I built my personal portfolio site from scratch, the choices I made, and what I learned along the way.

📍 Live Site: josephjo.me

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🚀 Why I Built It

I wanted a central place to showcase my skills, projects, and provide an easy way for people (recruiters, collaborators, curious devs) to learn about me. I also wanted something lightweight, fast, and search-engine friendly.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• HTML & CSS – No frameworks, just good old-fashioned markup and styles.

• Responsive Design – Built mobile-first.

• Custom Animations – Subtle transitions for a modern feel.

• Self-hosted via GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Tunnel (for now).

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💡 Design Philosophy

• Keep it clean and minimal

• Highlight my skills and personality

• Use accessible colors and fonts

• Optimize load speed and SEO

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⚙️ SEO & Performance Tips

Here are a few tricks I used to improve my visibility:

• ✅ Custom meta tags for title, description, and social share previews

• ✅ Used alt tags and semantic HTML

• ✅ Sitemap.xml and robots.txt included

• ✅ No unnecessary JavaScript — lightning-fast loads

I’m still working on getting backlinks (which help with Google ranking), but just launching it taught me a lot about how SEO actually works.

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🔗 Lessons Learned

• Even a one-page site can be powerful if it’s focused.

• Good SEO isn’t just about keywords—structure, speed, and clarity matter too.

• Sharing your site in the right places (like GitHub README, forums, Dev.to!) builds credibility and organic visibility.

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🙌 Want to Build Yours?

Feel free to view the source or get inspiration: 📎 Portfolio: josephjo.me

I’d love feedback, or if you’ve built something similar, drop it below — I’m always curious to see how others approach their digital “business card.”

Thanks for reading! 🚀