How to build a free-forever website portfolio in 10 minutes
…that’s still personalized and unique
In the spirit of the lean startup, here’s an easy, quick guide to Frankenstein your way into a portfolio website that:
- 100% free forever — no need to pay for domain registry, hosting, storage, etc.
- looks good — built (and used) by experienced devs and designers
- relatively easy to build
Before we start:
This guide assumes you’re working on a Windows laptop with an IDE (like VS Code).
Step 1: Install Chocolatey
To install hugo, first — open powershell by typing powershell on Windows search bar, right-click → Run as administrator
After that, you’ll see something like this:
To install Chocolatey, follow this guide.
Close the powershell window and open it again.
Step 2: Install Hugo
To install Hugo on Windows, run this on powershell
Follow this guide to the end for the (general) next steps.
I generally followed the guide in the link above but used hugo-theme-console for my website. Which means, I ran this on powershell
cd quickstartgit initgit submodule add https://github.com/mrmierzejewski/hugo-theme-console.git hugo-theme-console
Then, I opened the folder where all this directory was stored (tip: look at the leftmost side of powershell and type it out on the whitespace of File Explorer to go to that directory)
Open the config file and edit with your preferred theme.
Step 3: Select a theme
For “hugo-theme-console”, this is how I edited the config file:
After saving the config file and running this command
▶ hugo server -D
The site can now be opened in localhost where changes in the code reflects on the site quickly
Step 4: Deploy site on Github pages
To deploy your site on the INTERNEEET, you can use the open-source tool — Github pages.
To do this within a few minutes, follow this guide.
Here’s the site in the wild.
If you encountered some problems, feel free to reach out.
Alternative: Hugo + Github + Netlify + Forestry
If you are not familiar with HTML or CSS but familiar with Github, here a video & article on an alternative method to deploying and posting on a Hugo website.
