Tips needed for a skills-presentation website

Question

Hello everyone,

I want to create a dummy presentation website that would show my .NET webprogramming skills; I could put a link to this dummy website on my blog and show it at interviews.

If you would need to create a presentation website that shows your web programming skills, what functionality would that website contain? Or if you were a hiring person, what would you like to see in such a website?

I need a few examples of web applications that I could implement in there. Someone told me already I could make a digg it system so for now I'm looking into that. Anything in frontend, backend, any tip could help me.

Thank you in advance for any suggestion.

Regards,

Andrei

Answer 1

Andrei,

It's aweful hard to look at a .net site and see programming skill behind it. A beautiful looking site can have a real mess of spaghetti code driving it, and a brilliantly engineered site with bad graphic design can look like it was made in the 1990s.

That said, I think your best opportunity is do do something with the MVC framework. Clever use of routing is a benefit clear to all, and mastery of jQuery (not really .net, I know...) would impress a potential boss/customer.

Of course, proper unit testing and good architecture is, in the short term, invisible. It's like a good foundation on a house. Nobody notices a good foundation, but everybody knows when a bad foundation breaks and your house collapses!

John

Answer 2

Have a look at this question. Hopefully it will enlighten you.

What contents should a professional programmer’s website have?

Answer 3

Whatever you decide on Andrei, make sure it's not trivial and also let the interviewing folks know before you come into the interview. You don't want to be scrambling for an internet connection etc. In fact, if you bring in your own laptop with all the tiers running on it, all the better.

Answer 4

Know your basics... .NET programming is good and all, but make sure your skills at integrating XHTML, CSS, XML, and ECMA show through. A lot of builders hide a horrendous site with flash/silverlight... If I were to ever look at someone, they would have to be able to create functionality and re-usability throughout the site without accessing the server for everything (Aside from AJAX). Really, from those 4 items, you can make nearly any site. After you have those down, create a link to a page showing off the flashy skills. They aren't always as important.

Answer 5

Thank you all so much for taking the time to provide a little feedback. Your advices are extremely valuable for me.

I already have a blog (http://www.andreicristof.com/Blog/), so this presentation website is not a 2nd blog; I intend to show that I have .net skills through various .net applications, so its a website where people can login and see the backend and all that, but also I shall be focusing on making a nice clean frontend that validates, and is not flashy (I don't like flashy, I'm a fan of clean websites).

Again, thank you and if anyone has other tips as well, please let me know.

Regards,