For years my projects page was a wall of text. Names, dates, a line each. Accurate, and completely forgettable - you can't tell a dashboard I'm proud of from a site I've half-forgotten when they're both one grey sentence.
So I rebuilt it around screenshots. It now leads with a few case studies - a hero shot, a strip of thumbnails, the story beside it - then a fuller catalogue you can open a line at a time. Click any image and it opens full-size; arrow or swipe through the rest.
The best work is the hardest to show
Here's the snag, and it's the interesting bit: most of my best work is internal. The backoffice a whole casino runs on, the tool that publishes artwork across twelve thousand games - nobody outside ever sees them, and I can't hand you a login. For a long time that's exactly why the page stayed a list. If you can't show it, why try?
The answer was to show it anyway, honestly: screenshots of the internal tools with the sensitive data blurred, the games that are public, the side projects that aren't finished yet, and a plain "type-only" line where something genuinely can't be shown. "I built this, and here's what it looked like" beats "I built this" every time, even when there's no URL to click.
Under the hood it discovers its own screenshots - drop an image in a folder, it appears, no lists to maintain - and the page still scores 100 on Lighthouse. But the lesson wasn't technical. If your best work lives behind a login, don't let that argue you out of a portfolio. Show what you can, say plainly what you can't, and let the pictures make the case.
