4.2 Decide What Content to Add from the Visitor's Perspective
Once a page starts to feel like a real portfolio, many people naturally move into the next impulse: keep adding, keep filling in, keep stuffing more information into it. The problem is, more content is not always better. For a personal homepage, what matters more is relevance. When people come here, they usually are not trying to read your whole life story; they want to quickly judge who you are, what you have done, and whether you are worth contacting or talking to further. What really determines what you should add is not “how much more can I write,” but “what do visitors most want to know first.”
So the most important move in this section is to switch from yourself to the visitor. You can think directly about three types of people: friends, HR, and potential collaborators. When they enter your homepage, what they want to see is not exactly the same, but there is overlap. Friends want to quickly know what you have been doing recently, HR wants to quickly know what you have done and roughly where your abilities stand, and potential collaborators care more about what you are actually good at and how to contact you. As long as you look at the page from this angle first, you will easily notice that some information is not actually that important, while some information should appear much earlier.
Start by asking a question more useful than “what else do I want to add”
You can absolutely begin by writing down one very simple sentence:
If someone only spends 30 seconds looking at my homepage, what is the one thing they should remember most?
This question will directly help you filter out many things that are not actually urgent to add. Because it forces you to switch from “what else can I write” to “what should others see first.”
What these three types of visitors usually care about
| Visitor | What they usually most want to know first |
|---|---|
| Friends | What you have been doing recently, and whether there is any new work or a new direction |
| HR / Interviewers | Who you are, what you have done, and roughly where your abilities fall |
| Potential collaborators | What you are good at, whether it is worth continuing the conversation, and how to contact you |
You do not need to create a separate page for each of these three groups, but you can find priorities from where their needs overlap. In many cases, that overlap is actually quite stable: who you are, what you have done, what you are doing recently, and how to contact you.
Content is not better when there is more of it, but when it is more relevant
This is also why Chapter 4 does not encourage you to “add every module you see.” What you need to do now is not pile an encyclopedia into your homepage, but judge which content best helps others understand you quickly.
A very practical criterion is: after adding this module, can it help visitors answer at least one of the following questions more quickly?
- Who is this person?
- What has this person been doing recently?
- What has this person made that is worth looking at?
- If I want to get in touch, how should I do it?
If a module cannot clearly help answer these questions, then it is probably not as important as you imagine right now.
Want to go deeper?
If you want a systematic understanding of requirements, user perspective, and how product documentation is written, you can jump to the advanced version and keep reading: