If you work in any kind of creative industry, whether you’re a writer, a photographer, a fashion designer or an artist, an online portfolio can be a great way to gain work and raise your profile, as well as being an easy place to refer people to when they are curious about what you do. For some professions, especially when you work on a freelance basis, potential clients tend to expect that you’ll have a web portfolio they can view, so if you don’t have yours set up yet, now is the time to do something about it. Here is how to get started.
Building Your Portfolio Website
The first step is to build a site that will form the basis of your portfolio. This is effectively the same as building any other kind of website or blog, only you need to pick a theme that suits the portfolio layout you want, for instance a gallery style theme for art or photography, or an archive style site for written work. There are loads of good free themes for WordPress created especially for different types of creative portfolio, so take your time to find one that really fits with your work and will show it off to its full potential. It is then worth spending some time customising your theme in terms of things like colours and fonts, and adding any branding you already have like logos if you operate as a company.
Hosting
As well as actually building the site and getting ready to add your work, you should also arrange a domain and hosting. While you can get free hosting for small scale sites like portfolios with WordPress, it looks far more professional to have your own domain and will help you to be found on the web by potential customers or people who may become fans of your work. Companies like Smart Hosting offer reliable, affordable hosting that is ideal for this kind of project.
Choosing Work to Include
If you are relatively new to your profession then you will probably know already which work you are most proud of and want to include in your portfolio, however if you are quite experienced and have hundreds or even thousands of things you could consider including, it can be quite a task to choose the right ones. It doesn’t hurt to have lots of things on your portfolio if you want to, however if you decide to put dozens of pieces of work on there, it is important to categorise them well and also to make the best or most prestigious things the most prominent when someone arrives on your site. Take some time to really look at what you’ve done and sort through it, sorting your work into things you don’t want to include, things you do, and things you want at the forefront.
Setting up a portfolio is not hard, and unless you have a colossal amount of work to go through, can usually be built, populated and put live in just a couple of hours, so why not make yours today?
