A one-day, hands-on workshop where you turn your own content + taste into a real coded site you own, deploy, and maintain yourself.
No templates, no AI slop, no subscriptions.
The stack we'll be building with
A deployed portfolio site in your own taste, on your own domain, built on a stack you control.
We all work from the same starter, but everyone's site turns out different. You leave owning the code and the content, with a workflow you can run again on any project after the day ends. And the confidence to ship without waiting for a template, a plugin, or an engineer.
Designers who are comfortable in Figma and want to own a real site instead of renting a template. Junior designers refreshing for the job hunt and Senior designers who want a site they fully control both get a lot out of it.
You don't need to be a developer. A good part of the day is technical and I walk you through all of it. If you can find your way around Figma and you know what good looks like, you have what you need.
Copywriting, images, case study material, whatever should live on the site.
If you have an existing portfolio on Webflow, Framer, or Squarespace, ensure you have the login and we'll pull your content across.
If you want your site deployed to a custom domain, you'll need to buy your own domain name and we'll configure DNS settings together.
Anything that points at how you want the site to feel: A moodboard, a few sites you love, a favourite accent color. The more you bring, the more your site will look like you.
A paid Cursor plan, installed and signed in before the day.
You don't need to know how to code, but it's helpful to have some familiarity with the terminal and basic web development concepts.
This is a hands-on workshop so you'll need to bring all of your own tools. Bring whatever you need to get the job done.
One full day, two sessions, with a break for lunch. We build from the plumbing up to a live site.
Set up the project, connect it to GitHub and Vercel, and ship a first test page so you know how to deploy and maintain the site yourself. Then lay the Astro foundation: the skeleton of the site, and how components and pages fit together.
Step away, eat, and come back ready for the afternoon.
Translate your aesthetic into a design system using design tokens. Drop your content in and build the core pages: a homepage, an about page, and a reusable work template for projects and case studies. Then push it all live, set up a custom domain, and add a staging URL so you can keep iterating safely afterward.
I'm Josh, a senior product designer based in Sydney with about a decade of experience, mostly as the first or only designer at early-stage B2B SaaS startups.
This workshop came from my actual process of building. Tabba, a browser extension I built and shipped, came out of this exact workflow, and I gave a talk on it at a recent Cursor Sydney meetup. My own portfolio website runs on the same stack you'll use here, so you're learning the process I actually use, not a demo version of it.
Five seats, one day, a portfolio site that's actually yours.