I designed and built my instructional design portfolio on Google Sites. I started out looking at options for building websites and quickly figured that the options Google Sites offers is free of cost. I was prepared to go with simple, easy to use features as long as the site was stable, I would be able to showcase my content with clarity and offer  a strong user experience. The cost factor was appealing and so I decided to go with this option.

I started digging in by looking at pre-built themes and  templates offered and getting my feet wet trying to put a few basic pages together to design the user interface. I added some predefined content blocks, images and text and found the overall process easy to work with. For my design portfolio, I came up with a color scheme of purple/yellow and used neutral colors like gray/white to balance the brighter colors. 

Using the hyperlink option started making the website much more functional. I was able to interconnect pages easily and even link from images to other pages. Buttons also helped with easy navigation. 

It was interesting to figure out how themes worked and how to design your own theme to include settings for colors, text, images, components and so on. I added my color scheme to the theme. Using Google Site's section and grid features, I was easily able to incorporate basic visual design aspects like contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity. These features helped me easily maintain a consistent look for the website across all pages. 

I used the Preview feature a whole lot to get a feel for the website across devices with different form factors such as mobile, tablet and laptop. I made slight adjustments as needed to ensure every page rendered well on different devices, but for the most part, this was taken care of by the site's in-built features.

Publishing the webpage was reasonably easy. I purchased a domain name and followed instructions on Settings-->Custom Domains. I also searched and referred to online instructions wherever I was stuck and was eventually able to get the website up and running. I used a hosting service to host all files related to my design portfolio projects and was able to link to them successfully  from my webpage.