A lot of y’all have personal sites. Personal sites with portfolios. Or you work for or own an agency where showing off the work you do is arguably even more important. Often the portfolio area of a site is the most fretted and hard to pull off. Do you link to the live projects? Screenshots? How many? How much do you say? How much of the process do people care about?
I’m afraid I don’t have all the answers for you. I don’t really do much freelance, work for an agency, or have a need to present work I’ve done in this way.
But! I tweeted this the other day:
Idea.
Build your case studies as microsites. Then they can just live alone and don't have to be a drag when redesigning your site.
If the microsite gets old and stogy, the project you're talking about probably has too.
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) April 25, 2018
I was out to lunch with Rob from Sparkbox recently. A few years back, we worked together on a redesign of CodePen, and a byproduct of that was a microsite about that process.
I remember working on that microsite. It wasn’t a burden, it was kinda fun. We built it as we went, when all that stuff was fresh in our minds. Now that site is kind of a monument to that project. Nobody needs to touch it. It doesn’t load some global stylesheet from a main website. It’s a sub-domained microsite. It’ll be useful as long as it’s useful. When it’s not anymore, stop linking to it.
I’ve also watched loads of people struggle with what to put in that portfolio and how to deal with case studies. I’ve watched it be a burden to people redesigning their site or building one for the first time. I’ve also looked at a lot of personal sites lately, and the default is certainly to work the portfolio into the site itself.
Maybe for some of you, making your case studies into these microsites will be a useful way to go!
It also then faces also the possibility of less consistency between the microsites from a design aspect, and/or linking other case studies from each case study which could result in broken links down the line.
Should lead to some interesting segregated analytics too, perhaps even a case against portfolio’s full-stop.
A landing page is a specific page on an existing domain — like your home page, services page, contact page, etc. A microsite is on its own domain; it may also have multiple pages, but it lives separately from your core site.
weeall. Microsite. I dont do that. But what I, what at least some of my colleagues do, is: Creating guidelines, a template “parcours” for the given project. So the step from project guidline / CI to a portfolio-centric “microsite” is probably pretty small.
cu, w0lf.