My Experience Building a Professional Portfolio with Velo

Creating an online portfolio in Velo was easy. Drag, drop, and finally, add some spice with custom code!

How to Build a Simple Portfolio Website in Velo

Firstly, I went to a site called “thispersondoesnotexist.com” to get a face for the portfolio. A truly beautiful specimen if I do say so myself.

And then I pick a generic name, how about “Joe Joseph”? Perfection.

Wix has this amazing tool where it picks colour palettes from a logo. Adobe has a very similar app called “Adobe capture” that works similarly. Though I just used Wix’s built-in one, this made picking a palette absolutely wonderful. And then it got to writing a fake description for the famous Joe Joseph.

He’s a photographer based in Canada, very good pictures I must say. Almost stock image quality if you must. How long has he been working in the field? 12 Years, since he was 15.

Best of all, he knows exactly what you need!

Adjusting the Positioning on the Website

Let's start positioning! Velo has this handy tool that shows the position of something while you drag it. This allows you to place images and text JUST on that sweet spot, 150, 200, 180 even.

In contrast to this however, it doesn’t translate well when editing the mobile version of your site.

Mobile positioning is like trying to get a car to move without fuel. You can’t.

Creating the portfolio with stock images and premade colour palettes however, one of the easiest things I’ve done. You could compare it to breathing, I’d still say it’s easier!

But again, for mobile it’s like breathing with asthma mixed with a dose of smoking.

Even though Mr. Joseph is a beautiful man, I don’t want his face plastered across half the phone screen! And don’t get me started on the comically large footer that cannot be thinned for whatever strange reason!

Otherwise, wonderful.

The issue arises with desktop viewports of the well, comically large footer. Who would've guessed? And to make it worse, even if there’s nothing in that footer, it still won’t get smaller. A nuisance, small, but a nuisance to be sure.

Another issue faced by the well-known Joe Joseph and his treacherously difficult mobile positioning was moving strips without cutting the image off, on Wix’s end of course.

If you were to move a strip up a tiny bit, its image is now a completely cut-off shred of paper, which only serves to create a claustrophobic environment for the rest of the text.

In this case, a quote from Lewis Carroll, Author of Alice in Wonderland, going from this very good looking quote section:

To this awful one:

Not the prettiest makeover in my humble opinion. I mean, what happened to the photo of the table? It had just disappeared! Luckily a minority of employers would look at a portfolio on a mobile phone.

Nice save, Joe.

Now, of course all these issues won’t be seen by the user as they’re easily fixed. If absolutely necessary though, it can be dealt with as it’s still better than positioning with `position: absolute;`, a complete plague on web development. 

View the Simple Portfolio I Created in Velo:

Check out the fruits of my labor here: https://siggyyt12.wixsite.com/joseph. I know it's pretty simple, but my goal was to get a portfolio site up and running as quickly as possible, and this took me less than 3 - 4 hours to do.

My Brief Review of Velo

I give the platform an 8 out of 10 overall, with 2 points knocked off for the aforementioned issues with mobile positioning and large footers.

The experience is great, UI is great, and creating a site is well, great! Wix also has a tool called Adi, a robotic smarty that creates the site for you! This could be used as a base for Velo, or you can just take the site and run with it!

Can you keep a secret? I heard some people don’t even take a look at it before publishing!

To conclude, Wix's Velo is a great platform. It has its issues when developing a site for mobile, yet makes up for them with the user interface and feature set. 8/10 is an appropriate score for this platform, despite the issues with mobile positioning.

Wix has other apps that you may want to check out to integrate with Velo, complimenting it in ways that external applications just can’t. To go on any longer would be both a waste of your time, as any words that needed to be said have been said!

I hope my brief exploration of the platform helped you understand some of its strengths and weaknesses. If you're at all interested, I highly recommend you give it a try!

This article is part of a writing contest hosted by Hacker Noon in partnership with Wix. Learn how to enter here and take a shot at winning $1000 every month, from March 1st, 2021 to May 31st, 2021.