I'm trying to find out what is "fair use" or not. I'm a web developer trying to get off the ground and my website portfolio has nothing. So, I'm thinking to have a section of my website called "how-to recreations" or the like, where I link to websites that I've programmed from scratch that are modeled after existing, possibly copyrighted websites. I would make my source code (for the design and not the server/database functionality; for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript, if you're tech-savvy) open-source, I wouldn't sell the recreation as a template, and on the page on my portfolio website1 that links to this recreation, I would state and link back to the site that I recreated and explain how I coded various elements of that site. It would just be used to show my coding ability to potential clients and to teach other programmers one way that a site's design out there could be implemented with code.
Tl;dr I'm copying a site's design solely for demonstrative/instructional purposes. Is that legal?
1I'm thinking to not make this page anything other than a how-to and a link to the recreation. But, if I wanted to, could I link back to my portfolio for potential clients that want to hire me based on this how-to/recreation? Would everything still be "fair use"?