Starting a website portfolio

As a computer science student looking for an internship, I decided I needed to create a website. My friends urged me to create a very simple website to get my name out there and then expand on it as time goes on. While I agree with them and would give the same advice to others, I knew I would prefer to start with something visually and technically interesting to me. My website is located at www.mathieu-lessard.com

I've been working with jQuery a bunch lately and would highly recommend it to anyone that would like to make their website a little more interesting. My website is some javascript, images, css, and one html file. Anyone that knows how to take the code is welcome to it. However it doesn't come with documentation on how to add and remove pages...


So, what should a portfolio website contain? I think there are key areas that need to be addressed on your website.

1. Who are you?
On your website portfolio, tells us who you are. Are you married? Do you like to cook?
Prospective employers want to know about you, so let them know who you are. Make sure all areas of your portfolio radiates the type of person you are.

2. Your experiences.
Have you gone to school? What did you study? Do you have any projects you've worked on? What were they?
Your portfolio should show what you are capable of. A great way of showing what you are capable of is showing what you have done. Show projects that you loved working on. I say "loved" because if you show projects you've done but despised, you are advertising yourself for a position you don't want.

3.Endorsements/References.
If you have comments from people about your work, try and display them. If you've received a thank you card for volunteer work, show it. If you've won a competition, we want to see it!

4. What do you do?
This is a very important area. Employers want to know what you do. Do you work on techie-projects on the weekend? Do you contribute to some open source software? Do you edit wikipedia?
It's very important to talk about what you've done and what you've studied, but a great example of what you are learning is what you are doing. Try and have some project that you work on for fun. For me, I've been very interested in Natural User Interfaces and will eventually post some stuff about that.


Best of luck! Remember, after you've made a website portfolio, use it! Get feedback on it, fix it, use it again. Good luck finding those positions!