A working website still leaves questions

When I first built my portfolio, most decisions about layout and navigation came from what I thought made sense. I could check that the pages loaded and the links worked, but that told me very little about how other people experienced the site.

Were visitors exploring the projects? Were they reaching the sections I wanted them to see? Was the layout helping them find what mattered?

I added Microsoft Clarity to give me a way to investigate those questions.

Looking beyond page views

Page views can tell me that someone visited a page. Behaviour analytics adds another perspective: how visitors move through it and interact with what is there.

Heatmaps and session recordings give me a way to explore questions such as:

  • Which sections attract attention?
  • How far do visitors scroll?
  • Do people explore more than one project?
  • Are important links or sections being overlooked?

These are questions to investigate, rather than results I can assume from installing a tool. The useful part is being able to compare my expectations with actual usage.

Making analytics optional

My site asks visitors whether they want to allow analytics. That choice is part of the experience too: visitors can reject analytics and still use the portfolio.

It also means the behaviour I can observe represents visitors who have chosen to allow it, rather than every visit to the site.

Deployment is the start of another stage

The biggest change has been in how I think about finishing a project. Putting an application into production proves that it can run there. Observing how people use it helps me decide what to improve next.

For a portfolio, that might mean revisiting the order of information, making navigation clearer or checking whether a project description gives visitors enough context. The data can help me choose which questions deserve attention before making changes.

What I am taking forward

My portfolio is a small application, but it gives me a useful place to practise a broader development habit: build, deploy, observe and improve.

Adding analytics did not finish that process. It gave me a better starting point for the next iteration.