The image above is a snapshot of the page I coded using HTML and CSS. When making a portfolio site, from a design perspective, you want to carefully think about layout, color scheme and appeal. Simple doesn’t mean boring. As designers, I feel that we need to embrace simplicity whenever possible.
Start with a sketch of your site. Or comp it using Photoshop. There are some tradeoffs when designing a custom website, but with CSS you can get 90% of the way there.
-Krishna
