These are the take-aways from my Q&A sessions working with students on their portfolios at Thinkful. Hopefully these guidelines will make building a successful portfolio site straightforward.
Keep it simple! Unless you have a blog, or some other major section to your site, it's likely that you don't even need a navigation. In practice, making a "cool reveal" or an awesome unique style is much better than packing in more pages and more projects. Here are the critical sections.