I Turned My Resume Into a Portfolio Site — From One Claude Chat

Everyone tells you to "have a portfolio site." The advice is right; the gap is the problem. You already have a résumé — a tidy PDF with your roles, projects, and skills — and turning it into a live, good-looking website is an afternoon of fighting a builder, nudging columns, and second-guessing fonts. Most people never close that gap.

Sitelas closes it in one prompt. Because it plugs into Claude as a connector, the résumé you already have is the input. You attach the PDF in the chat, ask for a portfolio, and Claude reads it, designs around it, and hands you a real Sitelas site — previewed privately, published only when you're ready. I did exactly that with my own résumé. Here's how it went.

All you need is the PDF

No new content to write, no template to shop for. If you can drag a file into a chat, you can do this.

One-time setup: in claude.ai, open Customize → Connectors → Add custom connector and paste:

https://sitelas.com/api/mcp

Sign in to Sitelas when prompted. From then on, Claude can build sites, change themes, read form submissions, and publish — all from chat.

Step 1: Attach your résumé and ask

Drop the PDF into the composer and type one line — "create me a portfolio website using Sitelas, résumé attached." That's the whole instruction.

Claude reads the résumé straight from context — your summary, roles, projects, skills — and treats it as the brief. It weighs the portfolio templates and picks the one whose register fits — for mine, a dark single-page "engineer" layout. It doesn't dump the PDF into a page; it maps each part of the résumé onto the matching section of a designed template, then builds the site.

How Claude turns a résumé into a site

This is the part that's easy to underestimate. A résumé has structure — a headline role, a summary, a reverse-chronological work history, a project list, a skills block, education — and a good portfolio has the same structure in a different shape. Sitelas's job is the mapping:

• Your title and summary become the hero and About section.
• Work history becomes an experience timeline.
• Projects become a project grid, one card each.
• Skills become a tech-stack strip; education its own block.

It also picks a template whose register fits the résumé. Mine reads as a senior software engineer, so it chose a dark, two-column "engineer" layout — restrained, monospace accents, the kind of thing that signals "I ship." A designer's résumé would land somewhere brighter and more visual. You're not picking from a dropdown of 40 themes; Claude picks the one that fits and customizes it to you.

You get a private preview first — nothing is public yet

Just like building from scratch, the portfolio lands as a draft. Claude hands you a preview URL that's private to you, and the permanent address stays a 404 until you publish. So you can click through the whole thing, read every section, and change anything — reword the About, reorder projects, swap the palette — before a single recruiter sees it.

This is also the moment to fill any gaps. If the template leans minimal and your résumé has more — a full skills grid, an education block, contact details — just say so, and Claude adds the sections. Every edit re-previews; the live site stays untouched until you publish again.

Step 2: Publish when it looks right

When the preview reads the way you want, tell Claude to make it live.

Claude promotes the draft to the permanent URL and archives the previous state, so a one-step revert is always available. The site is now live at a real address you can put on LinkedIn, in an email signature, or at the top of your next application.

The result

Here's what came back from my résumé — a dark, two-column portfolio with a sticky profile card, an About section, an experience timeline (xMap, Turing, Decision Labs), a projects grid, and social links, all pulled straight from the PDF.

It reads like a site someone built on purpose, not a résumé pasted into a wrapper — because the content is mapped into a real design, not poured into a box.

Make it yours

A generated portfolio is a strong starting point, not a cage. Everything is editable two ways: keep prompting Claude in the same chat ("add an education section," "make the accent green," "move Projects above Experience"), or open it in the visual editor and adjust by hand with the same draft → preview → publish flow. You can also wire up a contact form so messages reach you — and because the site lives next to your other Claude connectors, you can read and reply to those messages from the same window.

Why do this from a chat at all?

Because the portfolio is never really "done." You change jobs, ship a project, win an award — and updating the site is one more message in a chat that already knows your history, not a login-and-relearn chore. The same window that built it keeps maintaining it. That's the difference between Sitelas and a traditional builder: it's a site that lives where you already work. For the from-scratch version of this flow, see How to Build a Website From a Claude Chat; to start from an existing page instead of a résumé, see I Cloned a Website From a Claude Chat.

Try it

Add the Sitelas connector in Claude, attach your résumé, and ask for a portfolio. Review the private preview, tweak anything, then publish. Sitelas is free while we're in early access — start at sitelas.com.