mr_bacon_pants

Your website works, but kinda stinks under the hood. Your header image is a 741k jpg. Here's an ~125k version at the same dimensions. You have no <h1> or <h2> but have a ton of <h3-4>. Do you not care about SEO?

You have what appears to be a 1-page website (customer facing anyways), that's 4.5mb, makes 92 requests, and includes a ton of scripts. If you're a new company and assuming this is a simple site, why jQuery and jQuery migrate? Couldn't you just figure out whatever conflicts and simply include jQuery? Why jQueryUI core/widgets/accordians/tabs?

I don't know what all else your website does, but it always amazes me when a company has a single-page portfolio/marketing website and chooses to put it on Wordpress with a shit ton of plugins. I like to implement the 80/20 rule there - if you need 80% of a tool (wordpress, jQuery, etc), use it. If not, just excract the parts you need, or write them by hand, and keep it lean and performant.

I mention this since you list html5/websites on your portfolio. Are you not interested in creating fast, well-coded sites that optimize speed, performance, SEO?

This is just FYI, so feel free to continue to assume otherwise, but I right clicked OP's website, viewed source for a few minutes, opened dev tools and watched the network panel, optimized OP's header image in photoshop and uploaded to imgur, then wrote paragraphs.

If you think any web designer gets clients by being #1 on Google for "web designer" you're gonna have a bad time. Not to mention getting anywhere near the first page for a term like that would take more than simply refactoring his site's code.

That's not what I said. As a "Front end developer," I would expect someone's baseline or first draft code to, at a minimum, include html5 tags, proper headings, and the stuff I mentioned. And that should take a few days to address, tops, after a first draft.

It's not like that's some kind of precious skill, it should be the default way a front-end dev writes markup. Especially so if this is a professional service you offer to others.

The point of a web design portfolio is simply an online place to show your past work.

It isn't just a "web design portfolio." It is the marketing site for his company's product, and the first 2 services listed are HTML5 and Websites, including "Advanced features fully utilising the modern standard of web technology."

If this were a web designer's portfolio applying for a design job, sure, no problem. However, if it were even a front-end developer's portfolio applying for a job, it would show me they overarchitect the shit out of a single page site and have no fundamental understanding of semantic, clean, modern markup. And if they do have that understanding, they either aren't familiar enough with it to be their first draft, or they didn't care enough to go back and make another pass at their code before handing it to someone who might dig in and look at it. I would expect this from a junior front-end developer - not a company offering building websites as a service they offer.

The overwhelming majority of people going to his site are likely there because he or someone else told them to go there specifically. And if that person knew all the stuff you said, why do they even need his services?

Agreed, however, I work for a big media company, and we are constantly looking to partner with companies like OP's for various reasons. I work on our core product, but we partner with people to build other stuff that isn't our core offering. One of the first things my leadership will do is ask me what I think of their portfolio (be it the portfolio itself, or work they have created) and I dig in to see if it's professional or just looks professional, but is sloppy and just a mess of plugins and crap underneath. And these are concerns I would have with a potential partnership.

It may not be a big deal or representative of what they offer customers, but it doesn't make a good first impression. Companies like these are a dime a dozen these days, and a sloppy portfolio - or one that doesn't demonstrate the skills you'll put into the service you offer me - is just dumb. You should always expect someone to pop the hood. If you don't, that's fine, but you're just limiting yourself. It isn't like you're refactoring an entire application to write clean, semantic HTML. Like I said, a first draft from a talented developer should include the basic things I listed by default.

This particular website is using a Wordpress theme called Pulse that anyone can buy, then customize with their content. So you may see this basic site all over the web, just different logos and colors and images and stuff.

But I think the design in general is popular because it's simple, functional, and easy to navigate being a single page. And once people start using designs like it, the design becomes familiar to end users, so websites that have this kind of design feel somewhat familiar already to users, even if it's the user's first time on the site.

That's a reason to use it if you were developing a new site today. We're attracted to things that are familiar and don't like to have to think about something and figure it out, so if a person is already somewhat familiar with your site's layout, they don't really have to think to use it - they already know how it works, how to navigate it, and know what to expect.