Building My Portfolio Website with PHP & Tailwind

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on building my personal portfolio website from scratch. Instead of relying on frameworks, I chose to use pure PHP with MySQL as the database and TailwindCSS for styling.

Why I built it from scratch

I wanted full control over my codebase, while also sharpening my backend and frontend skills. By doing this, I learned a lot about structuring a project, security best practices, and performance optimization.

Tech Stack

• PHP 8 + PDO for database operations
• MySQL 8 for storing posts, projects, and analytics
• TailwindCSS for styling
• JavaScript (Vanilla + AJAX) for interactions

Features I implemented

• Blog system with categories, excerpts, comments, and reactions
• Admin dashboard to manage content (posts, services, testimonials, etc.)
• SEO-ready with meta tags, OpenGraph, and PWA support
• Visitor tracking & analytics (device, referrer, pages visited)

This project is still growing. Next, I’ll add more automation and maybe deploy it live on portfolio.runaz.app.