Purpose: Your portfolio must clearly define its purpose. Whether it is for job applications, displaying freelance creations, demonstrating innovative engineering solutions, revealing creative product designs, or simply sharing personal achievements, clarify what you want the viewers to take away from it. 

Target Audience: To effectively meet the expectations of your audience, it's undoubtedly essential to understand your audience and identify what they prioritize and are interested in. For example, creativity and visual appeal may be the most appreciated elements when pursuing a designer job. On the other hand, concise explanations and clear demonstrations of problem-solving skills and technical knowledge would be highly valued.

Website-Building Platforms: There are website builders like WIX, WordPress, and Google Sites that can help you significantly simplify and shorten the process of creating a portfolio. Some platforms offer productive tools, such as drag-and-drop features, customizable templates, pre-designed themes, and further provide wallpaper albums. Even though a lot of users have insufficient programming knowledge and website design experience, they still have access to such great design flexibility.

Custom-Built Websites: If you have a sufficient amount of experience in programming, building a website from scratch using fundamental frameworks like Bootstrap or React gives you full control over the design, layout, and functionality of your portfolio. This approach will allow you to have the advantage of full personalization, which can be crucial for displaying unique interactive elements, animations, and custom-built features that can set you apart from others. Also, a custom-built site not only demonstrates one's technical proficiency in web development but also shows their passion for creative design—these all could be strengths for applications to jobs or university programs.

Domain Name: Despite this may appear to be a negligible detail, a professional domain name is important for establishing credibility. Use a simple, memorable domain like www.FirstLastName.com. Avoid free subdomains (i.e., www.yourname.wixsite.com) as they can create an unprofessional impression.

Quality > Quantity: Focus on presenting a few high-quality, honorable, unique projects rather than overwhelming the portfolio visitors with every single piece of work you have ever done. Carefully select the projects and creations in your portfolio to allow them to clearly demonstrate your diverse skills, creativity, and problem-solving ability. Avoid including incomplete or low-quality (i.e. too simple, too general) work because such inclusion might impact the overall impression of your portfolio.

Diversity: Aim to select a greater variety of projects to allow you to showcase your versatility. Include examples of different types of projects, whether it be an engineering prototype, a 3D CAD model, graphic design, or a collaborative team creation. With each project in display complementing each other, it will demonstrate your interdisciplinary experience and your ability to succeed across multiple domains. 

Highlight YOU: Clearly state your role and contributions in each project, especially collaborative work. Be specific about your responsibilities, and highlight the tasks you have performed, whether it is leading the design, coding specific features, or developing mechanical components. This will enable prospective employers to easily understand the skills and traits you are capable of bringing to the table and how you stand out from others in team projects. 

Logical Flow: Logically organize your portfolio, making it as easy as possible to follow your narrative and navigate through your web pages. Most basic: start with an “About Me” introduction section, then proceed with your projects, followed by more specific descriptions about your skills and other contact information. Organizing the projects chronologically or by category is also an efficient method to enhance the user experience.

Clear Navigation: Use a clean and intuitive navigation bar with clear headings. For example, headings like "About Me,” "Projects," and "Contact Information.” Try to avoid using overly creative or ambiguous wordings within labels, as they are very likely to confuse the users. Moreover, keep in mind the fundamental concept of good website design, ensure that your key sections of projects and personal information can be quickly found by the visitors, and they can easily return to the homepage.

Mobile Responsiveness: Considering how most people visit websites on either their smartphones or tablets, it is critical to make your portfolio mobile-friendly. It will be very beneficial to integrate designs that can allow the site to transition seamlessly with the change in screen sizes and orientation. Before publishing your portfolio, it is suggested that you test your website on several devices to ensure smooth navigation and readability.

Project Overviews: To make your presentation direct and concise for the visitors, provide a brief overview—including the goal, the problem to be solved, and the final solution—of each project. 

Highlight Process Documentation: Instead of only presenting the final result or creation, demonstrate the research and development process through early sketches, iterations, CAD prototype models, or experimentations. This provides the users more insight into how you approached the problems and further refined the solutions. It essentially helps you create a strong profile of yourself as a problem solver and creative or critical thinker.

Personal Insight/Reflection: Incorporate personal reflections or even senses of achievement about each project that you have completed. Elaborate on the lessons you learned, challenges you overcame, the skills you developed, and how this experience has influenced your future approaches. This brings your portfolio to another level of authenticity and shows your commitment to constant growth and learning.

Consistent Design: Ensure that the choice of fonts, color schemes, and webpage layout style is consistent throughout the website. It is recommended to stick to 3 to 5 complementary colors and apply them consistently for headings, labels, buttons, and background elements. Therefore, it is important to select a primary template that fits the style of your work, such as selecting more minimalistic-styled templates for technical or scientific disciplines and more colorful and vibrant templates for artistic disciplines. This will establish a cohesive, balanced, and professional tone and appearance, which will complement your personal brand impression.

High-Quality Media: Ensure you use high-resolution images, videos, and 3D renderings for your work. Never show any pixelated or poorly edited photos since they can destroy the impression of the content quality, causing a loss of credibility in the technical projects and interest in the artistic projects. Hence, always enhance images with Photoshop or other image editors beforehand if needed.

Open/Empty Space: Open space is essential in creating a clean and uncluttered design. It substantially improves the readability and focus of your content. Always make sure that there is an adequate amount of space between sections, images, and texts to allow the visitors to avoid both sensory and information overload.

Regular Updates: Keep your portfolio updated by adding new projects, skills, and achievements regularly. Remember: an outdated portfolio will give the impression of stagnation and passiveness, while an up-to-date portfolio reflects consistent growth and suggests active learning and engagement within your professional field.

Remove Outdated Work: As aforementioned, it is advised to regularly evaluate and eliminate older projects that no longer reflect your field of interest or expertise. As you improve and develop more advanced skills, it is also important to replace the earlier projects to not only ensure your portfolio demonstrates your current abilities and potential but also prevent your portfolio from overloading—resulting in the visitors having difficulty focusing on the best and most updated achievements.