Further Resources

Overview

This unit lists a few resources to help you build and improve your portfolio website or similar future products.

Goals

  • Understand what kind of (portfolio) websites you can build.
  • Know about other options to host your portfolio website.
  • Be familiar with other portfolio type products.

Reading

Quarto allows you to create many different types of websites, including portfolios, blogs, documentation sites, and more. Here are some resources to help you explore further.

Portfolio website features and examples

The basic setup is a static website that contains text and images. But with Quarto, you can go beyond that. You can include interactive visualizations, code snippets, and even embed data analysis results directly into your portfolio.

The official Quarto guide is a great place to start exploring the various features and capabilities of Quarto. It covers everything from basic setup to advanced customization options.

The Gallery section of the Quarto website showcases a variety of examples created by other users. Browsing through these examples can provide inspiration and ideas for your own future products.

Different publishing platforms

Using GitHub Pages is a great option for hosting your portfolio website, but there are other alternatives. A popular one is the Netlify web hosting service. Netlify offers a free tier that is quite generous and easy to use. You can connect your GitHub repository to Netlify, and it will automatically build and deploy your site whenever you push changes. Or you can publish to Netlify directly with Quarto.

For a nice walk-through of using Netlify with Quarto, see A beginner’s guide to building a simple website with Quarto & Netlify by Jadey Ryan.

Another good resource is the Netlify section of the Quarto documentation website. The official Quarto website also describes other publishing options.

Dissemination using Quarto and GitHub Pages is an online book by James Bartlett which contains a lot of information about using Quarto and GitHub Pages, not just for websites but also other output formats.

Other portfolio type products

In addition to a website that showcases some of your work, you can create other products that demonstrate your skills. For instance, you could write a book with Quarto, which is very nicely supported. See the Quarto book documentation for more information. As an example The R for Data Science book by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund is written with Quarto/bookdown.

It is often also useful to combine different products. For instance, you could have a portfolio website that links to one of your GitHub repositories which contain data, code, and everything else for a project you want to showcase. The portfolio website might feature a single page showing the main results, and then you link to the GitHub repository to allow interested readers to explore everything you did.

Summary

We briefly discussed resources and examples to further help you extend your online portfolio and more generally your online presence to showcase your skills to others.

Further Resources

See above.

Test yourself

Practice

  • Check out at least 3 of the examples in the Quarto Gallery and note down what you like about each of them. If available, go to the GitHub repository for each example and see how they were built.

  • Visit Andrew Heiss’s website and explore how he has organized his online presence. Make sure to visit at least one of his teaching/course pages – which are stand-alone pages, but everything is built with Quarto. Also go to his GitHub profile to look ‘behind the scenes’ and see the code and content underlying his website(s).