Design your way

Getting started as a freelance web designer is full of challenges, not the least of which is figuring out how to create a portfolio website.

You need a way to build your web presence, whether you’re a student, unemployed, or a part of a design studio.

Not only will a portfolio page offer you a chance to showcase your work, it offers a platform for blogging about your design life and current projects.

So, how to build a portfolio website? How do you display your work? How do you show your potential customers what you’re capable of doing for them? It can be hard to figure out how you’re going to start building a portfolio website.

A simple Google search will show you plenty of independent freelancers and studios with good portfolio websites, but they can all seem so different. You can start by sticking to some key points and goals for your portfolio.

What makes a good portfolio website?

Logo

When making a portfolio site, remember that it is all about presenting things to the customer. The first thing he or she will usually see is your logo. Place your logo where customers will automatically look first, so you can start associating all the work in the web design portfolio with you and/or your studio.

In the Western World, the best location is usually on the top left of the page, as we read left to right, top to bottom. Be sure to link your logo to your homepage, as that is expected by most customers, especially from a professional website, especially from a professional website about a web designer’s work.

As for what makes a good logo, that’s up to you. Remember that you’re trying to build online presence. For freelancers especially, this is the gateway to success. Your name is a good option for a logo when creating a portfolio website.

Tagline

Now that your potential customer has seen who owns the website, one of the most important things you need to do is let everyone know what exactly you do. You need to have a tagline. It should be a snappy, quick summary of what you do and what you can offer.

When creating a tagline, ask yourself:

• What are you?
• What do you do?
• Where are you from?
• Are you a freelancer? Or are you a part of a studio?
• Are you looking for work?

Contact

While often neglected, this is one of the most important things you need to have on your portfolio website. It doesn’t matter if a client is impressed with your work if they can’t figure out how to get in contact with you. You will not be hired without making your contact information available.

Your contact information needs to be presented in a clear and obvious manner. It should be very easy to find and access. Offer a way for customers to contact you for a chat or a quote. You could even have a form available to make it even easier, allowing them to email you right from their email manager without needing to write down your email address.

You can use that form to ask for particular information you need, including email address, name, website, or even the details of the customer’s proposed project.

Blog

A blog is a great way to keep your portfolio website active. Blog about your expertise, new projects, old projects, or relevant news. Offer the chance for potential customers to subscribe to an RRS feed to follow you. Show off your most popular posts. Your blog is another way of building your web presence.

Allow visitors to post comments. As tempting as it is for security purposes, don’t force commenters to register or add Captcha software. This discourages people from commenting and providing you with feedback. There are a lot of anti-spam plugins out there that are much less off-putting.

Social media

Encourage people to follow you on social media websites if they like your work. Let them know that following your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram (or any of a million other options) can offer the most up-to-date updates. Make the most of social media on your portfolio site. Use it as a way to network and market your skills.

Principles for creating an online portfolio

Once you have the basics of logo and tagline down, your website design is up to you, based on your needs goals. Here are some major guiding principles for creating an online portfolio:

Make yourself available

Availability will make or break you. If it’s not clear how interested people can reach you, they will not work at it. There are plenty of other freelancers out there with many of the same skills as you have. If it’s easier to reach them than you, they will get the jobs and you will not. Ease of contact can’t be emphasized enough.

Ensure your site loads quickly

Time is money, especially for anyone working a project or a business. Most people wait less than 3 seconds for a page to load before moving on. You need to invest (time, effort, or even money) in creating a functional website.

Choose a solid hosting package to ensure fast load speeds. Look carefully at what a web hosting service has to offer and do your due diligence in reading reviews while you’re in the early stages of making a portfolio website. A slow website will lose customers.

Be yourself

While it’s a good idea to take a look at some of the well-made websites out there already created by successful freelancers, don’t treat them as the perfect “how to make a portfolio website” guide. You are selling your work and your creativity. While you do need to market yourself, it won’t do to pretend to be someone else or copy their way of doing things.

Show your personality

In that vein, add a bit of a personal touch. Let potential customers see who you are. Add a nice headshot of yourself or your team, if you’re a part of a group. Let them know you’re a real person. Part of the reason people go to freelancers and small studios is because they know they’ll be dealing with real people who can customize projects to order. Emphasize that fact on your portfolio site.

Tell a tale

As with any other kind of communication, your pieces should tell a story. Aesthetics should match the ideas they’re trying to communicate. A web site designed for a locally owned, mom-and-pop restaurant known for recipes from two generations ago should look the part.

Your work should be communicating something, telling some tale to give people a reason to be interested. That’s what your customers want to see.

You might want to turn each piece on your portfolio into a case study. Explain the needs that the clients for that piece had, or the particular problems they needed addressed. Detail the solutions and components of the project. Highlight your processes and your ability to creatively overcome challenges.

Turn them into a kind of short story that can hold the interest and catch the attention of potential customers. Brag creatively and reap the rewards.

Let your work speak for itself

Have you ever seen a good painting or photo be ruined by its ridiculous and distracting frame? Try to avoid that same scenario on your portfolio site. Make your work the focus and don’t clutter up the site with loud little additions. Keep it simple and elegantly professional. Let the skills you’re trying to sell take center stage.

Quality over quantity

Anyone visiting your portfolio website will probably only view two or three of your pieces before deciding if they want to use your services. In light of that fact you should only display your best work.

Try to stick to displaying only newer pieces, not things you did years ago, unless they are high profile in which case you should highlight those pieces in particular. While your full personal portfolio can show off the full breadth of what you can do, stick with only a few to show off on your portfolio site.

Any interested potential customer will probably not look through all of it. Remember that as you organize your portfolio site’s layout and presentation.

Show your real work

Anyone looking to buy your services is looking for you to show off your actual services.

If they want to see redesigns of existing products, they can just as easily find them on a design student’s Instagram as your portfolio website. Show them what you’ve actually done as much as possible, so they can see that you can offer up original and successful results.

Include personal and pro bono projects

Even if you didn’t get paid for a project, you did make it. Clients won’t care. Demonstrate the personal projects you’ve done to show that you enjoy what you do and are a real self-starter.

Feel free to add in work you’ve done for friends or even charities, as well.

Don’t let these overwhelm your portfolio though. Make sure you balance out the professional and the professional, so that your services don’t just look like a hobby.

Include appropriate project covers

It’s a common practice to see projects presented with thumbnail images, also known as covers.

These are used to draw potential customers into clicking and give them an idea of what to expect. Choose a clean image that shows off something unique about the project and you’ll be off to a great start with your project covers.

Share your process

Show off what goes into your work. End results aren’t everything and every project is its own story. Show interested people how you do what you do. It demonstrates that you value your craft.

It catches the eye and means that clients aren’t just hiring a freelancer off the internet, but something of a craftsman who brings real thought to their work. Other creative people might see what you’re doing and be struck by how you solve problems or create solutions.

There are a lot of different ways to showcase your processes:

• Do a write-up about your thinking behind certain creative decisions you made.
• Do a time lapse video or photo gallery of the project.
• Show some of your initial sketches and designs.
• Feature design elements on their own, such as you might with a typeface or logo or user interface.

Give credit where it’s due

Designers surprisingly rarely extend credit to others. You really should do this. Others will appreciate the respectfulness of it. Potential customers will understand exactly what you do, which isn’t always very obvious.

Most in-house or agency projects involve anywhere from a few to more than dozen people. If you really did do it all yourself, go ahead and brag, because that’s not easy. If you didn’t, make sure you credit them for all their parts in the project. Give others credit for their art, copywriting, branding…whatever they did, let viewers of your portfolio know.

Implying you did everything is both dishonest and misleading. If a customer has skewed expectations, it can be easy to embarrass yourself or even lose the job.

Think about your real contributions and showcase those. You wouldn’t want anyone else to take credit for what you’ve done, so don’t do it to others. Give them credit for work displayed on your portfolio website.

Think about what you include

Be professional and calculating about what you include on your portfolio website. Take the time to go through your pieces. Don’t display anything that embarrasses you or doesn’t look like your best work. Like with anything else, you get out what you put in.

You will get more of the kind of work that you show in your portfolio. If you didn’t enjoy a certain kind of project or working with a certain kind of customer, don’t show those pieces.

Again, when deciding on what on display, also remember that people will look at fairly few pieces.

People have short attention spans. They will only click through a gallery a few times. Remember to go for quality, not quantity. A good rule of thumb to start with is displaying 10 to 20 pieces, each carefully chosen to show off your talents.

Keep it cohesive

Your portfolio site’s design is just like any other project. It will function much like your resume.

This site will be the way you begin building (or continuing) your online presence. Take the time and care to craft it right. A good website will let your potential customers see what you can bring to the table and make you stand out among the many other freelancers on the web.

You should avoid being boring, but you should also remember that unnecessary flash and gimmicks can sometimes drive away your customers.

To seem professional, your portfolio site should have a coherent aesthetic, with consistent layouts, image sizes, and writing styles. Colors should fit together and not clash. Pages should look like they belong on the same website, with all the same principles underlying their design.

Note that typography sets the tone just as much as anything else.

It should fit the feel you want to give (playful, elegant, professional) and complement your design samples. Make sure it never steals the spotlight from them, as they should be the central focus of your portfolio. Keep the typography as consistent as everything else.

Provide detailed case studies

Showcasing your work is just one use for portfolio website.

Potential clients will also be looking for the results of your work. Did your designs help your past customers? Did you create something that made their business more successful, or help them achieve their goals?

Use case studies to answer these questions. Explain your reasoning behind your designs, what you saw the end goals as and how your choices contributed to them.

A business case for your work will help your potential customers see that you have the right sort of thinking. They can see that your products can help them succeed down the line.

A case study should include the following:

• Project description and background—provide context. Include budget constraints, timelines, and the overall purpose for the project.
• Project goals – all projects have a purpose, tangible goals, and an overall desired end state. What were you and your customer looking to achieve?
• Creative strategy– explain your thought processes. Why these colors? Why this kind of layout? Images won’t be enough. Explain the why. Include creative insights, research, and design iterations.
• Results– demonstrate why the project was a success. If you can get quantifiable results (i.e. increase in web traffic, more product orders, more publicity) from a client about the results of your project, include them. If you can demonstrate that your work can get results, you’re more likely to get business
• Your role—explain what you did for the project if you worked in a team. Specify which elements and ideas were yours.
• Client testimonials – Let your past customers help you sell your work to future ones. Simple quotes expressing satisfaction are great confidence boosters. Go ahead and ask for these as you wrap up a project.

Stay professional

At all times, in all aspects of your portfolio site, stay professional. Keep your language concise and clean.

Don’t ramble. Always edit all your text and make sure it does not go on forever, but says only what it needs to say. You don’t need to sound like a robot, but you should come across as a professional selling service to other professionals.

Conclusion

The above tips are a great starter for learning how to make a portfolio on the net. If you’re looking for ways to get started using them, there are a lot of options out there.

If you already have a website, go ahead and start creating an online portfolio to add to it.

A lot of existing hosting services, like WordPress, offer themes specifically set up for portfolios. If you’re brand new to freelancing or just don’t have a website yet, take a look at Dribble or Behance.

These are free global creative communities where you can show off your work and network with others, maybe even find a job. Flickr has been growing into a portfolio site, as well, and functions much like a regular portfolio, allowing you to group your work into categories.

A lot of people also use Instagram as the unofficial portfolio, as well, though usually on work-focused accounts (you don’t want to be mixing your work and your selfies).

Hopefully, now you have some ideas on how to build a portfolio website!

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