Build a Killer Online Portfolio in 9 Easy Steps
Every freelancer should have an online portfolio. You’ve got one, right? If not, skip to the last paragraph of this post. It’s written for you.
If you do have one, you can breathe a sigh of relief. You’re halfway there.
Building your portfolio is easy. The hard part is making it good. A killer portfolio does more than just showcase your work. It transforms visitors into clients. Best of all, it’s an automatic work generator.
In this post, I want to show you how to take your online portfolio to the next level.
1. Ask the question
Online portfolios tend to come in one of three shapes: a blog, a website, or a dedicated solution (something that’s just a portfolio, without any of the extra stuff).
The question I’d like you to have in mind as you read this is: how well does my site answer the questions potential clients are likely to have?
2. Focus on simplicity
Your portfolio exists to impress and persuade potential clients. If you have a blog or website, though, you might (wisely) be trying to draw traffic from other sources. Maybe you’re sharing your knowledge, or providing value in other ways.
This has one potential drawback, though: you’re catering to so many people that the clear message you want to send potential clients might be getting lost in the noise.
If you’re looking for work, don’t be afraid to say it simply and boldly. Stick a ‘Hire Me’ button, link or section on your site.
Simplicity is the key to good web design. Potential clients will have one key question: where do I go if I’m thinking about hiring this person?
Give them the answer, as simply as you can.
3. Optimize your ‘About’ page
The importance of a good ‘About’ page can’t be overestimated. It’s the place potential clients will visit when they want answers to some essential questions:
- Who is this person?
- What qualifications and experience do they have?
- Do they seem trustworthy and reliable?
- Are they looking for work?
- Can I see some examples of previous work?
You can answer the trustworthy and reliable question in two ways. You can include testimonials from previous clients, or you can emphasize the ways in which you’re a decent, normal person: you have a family, hobbies and so on.
For the last question, I think it’s important to link to a page containing examples of your previous work and nothing else: the portfolio in its most traditional form. It will allow potential clients to get to know what you’re capable of without any distractions.
4. Provide a clear means of contact
It can’t hurt to put contact information at the bottom of your ‘About’ page, but this isn’t the only place you should make it available.
Website usability is conversational. If a potential client wanted to get in contact with you, would they ask you to tell them about yourself? Probably not. It doesn’t really make sense. They would instead ask: how can I get in contact with you? A prominent ‘Contact’ page is a clear and simple answer to that question.
5. Create a dedicated ‘Hire Me’ page
If your portfolio is a traditional showcase of your work, your ‘About’ page will suffice. If your blog or website is aimed at a broader audience, however, you’ll probably want to use your ‘About’ page to explain what your site does and what it has to offer.
That’s when a ‘Hire Me’ page becomes important (though you’d probably call it ‘Hire Jonathan’, or whatever your name is). It should include all the information listed in the ‘About’ page section above.
Link to your hire page in a prominent way from your site’s front page. If you want to get hired, be bold about it.
6. Show off only the skill you’re selling
This might sound too common-sensical to be worth mentioning, but it’s a mistake I see made in a lot of online portfolios.
The freelancer showcases a wide range of great work. You head to their ‘About’ page, only to discover that they’re only looking for work in one of the areas covered. They’re presenting their portfolio as a vanity folder rather than a useful resource for potential clients.
If you only want web design work at the moment, for example, don’t showcase your photography. The items in your portfolio should always demonstrate your skill in the area you’d like to be hired in.
7. Tell stories potential clients want to hear
It’s very likely that you know more about the area you freelance in than your potential clients do. People who hire web designers, for example, are rarely designers themselves. They’re unlikely to appreciate your work for its creative value alone.
For that reason, you need to tell stories about your work. Not lies, of course — real, genuine stories. Stories about results. What did it do for your client? How did they benefit from your work?
Don’t showcase the items you’re most proud of. Showcase items that yielded the best results for your clients. Did website traffic spike 30% after that redesign you did? Did the last article you wrote for a client make the front page of Digg?
Potential clients are more interested in the story than the work itself. Always remember that your work is a means to an end: more traffic, more profits, more sales. By focusing on the end result, you’re focusing on what potential clients really want.
8. Build traffic to turn visitors into clients
You can source-out potential clients and point them to your portfolio, or you can create a portfolio people will find without your help. Some of those people will be potential clients. Get enough traffic, make a good impression, and your portfolio could become an automatic work generator.
More quality traffic generally means more work. However, it takes a lot of effort to build a popular website. Not necessarily a lot of effort in one go, but a sustained effort over time. For most successful bloggers and webmasters, that sustained effort feels more like a rewarding hobby than a chore.
As a freelancer, there are a number of ways you can add value to your site:
- Share your knowledge with other freelancers.
- Mentor wannabe freelancers.
- Showcase your own work and work you like.
- Create useful tools.
- Share personal stories.
That’s just five options. I don’t doubt there are a hundred more. There are no right or wrong answers, so stick with something you love doing. That way, your enjoyment will still be there, even when the traffic isn’t.
9. Add a little dose of SEO
If you don’t want to work at creating content and generating inbound links, I’d suggest using this simple tip to optimize your site for search engines. Some of you reading this will be familiar with SEO, but for those who aren’t, it essentially refers to the things you do to place your site higher in the search results for certain keywords.
If you can pull this off, you’ll get an automatic stream of search traffic without doing too much work.
If you’re a web designer working out of the Bay Area, for example, potential clients will probably be searching Google for ‘Bay Area web designer’. Incorporate this word string into your site as much as is possible (and natural). Put it in your site’s title bar, work it into your ‘About’ page, and so on.
Just remember that you need to keep it subtle. Unless there’s plenty of competition for your keyword string, a few mentions should be enough.
The traffic you’ll get from this practice is made up of people looking to hire someone just like you. It’s easy to do, and very much worth doing.
* Those without a portfolio, this is the paragraph for you. You can create a dedicated portfolio in a few minutes at Carbonmade. It will look something like mine.
Done? Great. You might want to expand on it after reading this post, which you should do, now you’ve got an online portfolio and all…
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I agree on this ‘More quality traffic generally means more work’, if you’ve created a good quality websites of course you have more work to come in.
This article is very interesting…Thanks Skellie!
would like to see samples of portfolios…
whew this is very nice tips to follow, I know all of this will work, thanks for sharing this infos, one thing caught my attention is the word that has quotes located in the right corner of the website, really thanks a lot for this information. I really like reading here. This is simple yet true.
Awesome article. good information here, even for those who already have portfolios up who want to tweak it to make everything run smoother.
Great article and good points!
This article actually reminds me of an article I wrote some days ago of “8 signs to when and why you need to redesign your portfolio website.” ( http://www.thuiven.com/viewentry/8-sign-redesign ). Hope this helps as well
I am definetly going to do some changes on my/our portfolio.
lol, i think my portfolio need an update in terms of showing more specific jobs that I want to receive and not everything that i am doing….
(www.polarmedia.ca)
But thanks for this article, love it !
(First Time Visitor)
Very cool site. The design is AWESOME! I am not really ready to get into Freelancing, but I am getting a lot of great design “tips” from this site. (Not going to steal anything, just hard to find sites with great design)
Step Seven is the one I haven’t implemented yet. I’m definitely going to find the stories behind the sites in my portfolio.
Thanks!
My portfolio needs to be updated http://www.connectioncube.com. This month it has to happen. It isn’t nearly as interesting as the rest of my work. I used a default Drupal template. It needs to get customized. I also need to add a blog to it.
I am trying to generate more leads through other sources as well. I started my first blog http://www.aiburn.com. Its a tutorial blog for Adobe Illustrator.
Another great post Skellie. I really like your writing voice and I would recommend your blog to any blogger. Its cool that you’ll be posting here now as well. I’ve got both of these in my feedreader (Vienna for the Mac).
Great advice, especially “Tell stories potential clients want to hear.” It’s true the people hiring do not appreciate good design but they want to know how it can help them. I tried to follow this approach in my portfolio at : http://zykinetics.com
Too many portfolios do nothing but present unexplained, enigmatic designs. I can see design genius but the hiring managers often need an explanation of what’s so great.
Great article especially as Im looking to redesign my portfolio when I can find time.
This is a very great outlined article with a lot of great tips in making an online portfolio. I am glad to see with my past website I created, many of these tips were on the ball. Taking time to research the ideas you have for your website is a must before trying to rush it online, as that is what I usually like telling to my clients when making an online portfolio site for them. Some listen and some rather think they know what is best and really that is their choice.
Another tip I usually like taking on is to get a couple of friends take a look at your website before it goes live. This is not just for “beta” testing purposes as the opinions they might have could greatly change you overall design or flow the data for the best results. The creator can never say his work is great, he must be told it is.
I am also glad to pick up on some tips in this article that will help me with the redesign that I am currently working on, as my current site does not explain my upcoming full-time freelancing career choices. These tips will help me with the redevelopment and redesign of my website, thank you.
Great post! I love how i find all this useful information as I’m redesigning my site. It is great!
I have a few ideas for my portfolio, the main one being adding one to the new design!
I had one up for a while but it wasn’t of the best quality and i was scared it was driving away potential client.
Who knew? LOL Boy you definitely wrote this article for me. I never even thought about a couple of the ideas. The hire me page or button is a very good one. Thanks
Good article. I read these ideas once in a similar article here.
Great points skellie at a crucial time for me as i redesign my site ready for its late January launch. I agree that the key to attracting clients is to keep it simple and make it as easy as possible for them to both know exactly what you can and offer and how they can contact you.
hi,
nice article. a portfolio should be just as that simple, straight to the point.
we used a nice platform to build ours, called http://www.indexhibit.org
it’s a nice simple CMS, easy to install and customize.
read the story behind to understand how and why it’s like that.
hope it helps.
enjoy.
Very good article for building a good website. Great to read.
http://web500.us
…how well does my site answer the questions potential clients are likely to have?
Pretty well, unfortunately…
I think its important to remember that SEO can still be used in portfolio network sites. Make sur eyou tag your images correctly, Give them good titles, and things of that nature.
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. It’s great to hear that some of the tips will lead to better portfolios, and by extension, more gigs (and better) gigs
.
@ Sean Hodge: That’s really kind of you. I hope I don’t disappoint!
I like # 7
“Don’t showcase the items you’re most proud of. Showcase items that yielded the best results for your clients.”
Thanks for the info…
Great post! I always love reading your articles so much great info! This helps a lot as I’m about to build my porfolio. thank you.
Idil
@ Guido & Idil: Thank you — I appreciate it
.
Thank you for motivating – now i’m definitely going to redesign my logo portfolio at http://www.logodiver.com/
Carbonmade.com is awesome! Nice find.
Wait, WHO is the target for carbonmade? Freelancers?
Personally, what self-respecting designer is going to use a free portfolio template service to showcase their work? I work at a large ad firm and if someone showed me a portfolio at carbonmade, I’d toss it.
Why? It tells me that you don’t have the skills (or the time to learn the skills) to build your own site, much less care about the aesthetics of your portfolio. If you’re really looking for work, I would highly recommend that you take the tie to design and build something unique to your own merits.
I mean, is that really what they consider a portfolio? No offense skellie, but it looks horrible. What kind of organization is that? It’s little more than thumbnail links to larger versions of your work. I don’t see how you couldn’t design a nicer vehicle to house it in your sleep.
Hey, Brian, maybe you should take the tie (sic) to READ your work before submitting them.
#10 would be “Sign up for Design Deadline“, right?
thanks for removing my post. censorship is cool.
my bad. didn’t know it was still being moderated!
Great tips. SEO is so important in any design. I just wish more clients took it seriously.
@ Brian: Yep, you can bet most web designers will design their own portfolio (and should). But not all freelancers are designers, so carbonmade might be a quick option for them.
It could also be useful to tide someone over who has no portfolio until they can get one together.
As for the look of it, I think it’s cool. But my portfolio is really my blog, anyway
.
Hi all, believe it or not, after looking at this article, i was greatly inspired and i actually came up with a portfolio myself in the form of microsoft word document. I attached it to the email which i will mass market to potentials clients.
If anyone is interested feel free to email me at ronald_soh@yahoo.com.sg. I be more than glad to share out my portfolio to you all.
If anyone have nice portfolio please share with me too.
Thanks in advance.
Thanks Skellie for this great guide. I’ve been working for the past few hours implementing some of things you’ve outlined here. Very good resource that I will bookmark for sure!
Nice article…the link to your carbon made portfolio doesn’t work…it looks like they lost your portfolio!
Very interesting article Skellie!! But where is your portfolio? As they say in Carbonmade: “they screwed up”. When you have a new one I’d love to see it. I was planning to polish mine as a freelance translator. Thanks anyway!
For the About page, may I also suggest a professional blurb or an artist’s statement? The choice would depend on the target audience. I think it’s an important part of marketing yourself and having something memorable attached to your name.
On the Contact page, I would also add a downloadble vCard for convenience (in addition to your plain text information). Why not give a user the option to add you to his or her address book and thus be reminded of you more often?
The “Hire Me” button is a good idea but how would you differentiate it from a Contact page? Would there still be a contact page? If so, how would the content on the hiring page differ?
“Show off only the skill you’re selling” is a wonderful piece of advice! I’ve made the mistake of marketing myself as the Swiss army knife of freelancers and seen it often. A freelancer without focus, looks like (s)he’s trying too hard to impress. Even if (s)he is that skilled in so many areas, it doesn’t come off as genuine or believable. Who would you hire, a jack of all trades / master of none or a focused professional who is passionate about a few key areas?
Thanks for the inspiring read!
Very nice! I’ve recently applied this article/tips to my own site
I first read this post a while ago and am reading it again after it got linked to another FS post. Thanks for the reminder – still trying to work out what to do with my (currently nonexistent) portfolio!
It would be great if you or someone else at FS could make a list of great online portfolios, perhaps according to type (design, writing, Unique/misc, social networking, etc) and then point out what makes those portfolios great. We could all use some inspiration
Thank you so much for this valuable tips. Anyone care to criticize or want to share their comments on my portfolio, http://www.fedmich.com/works/
Thanks in advance to those who will check.
Cheers to all of us freelancers
thanks for the very good source, it really helps me a lot
Great summary to biuld a portfolio. You wrote – 9 easy steps – what is so easy to build a killer online – portfolio. It’s hard work to think about and to do the right decisions. But with this helpful article it something easier
Ralph
Nice article
Thanks Skellie for this great guide. it really helps me a lot.
This a great article! Thanks! I just created my first ever online portfolio thanks to support of this article.
Have a look if you have time. nearski.cabonmade.com
Cheers
Nearski
Good article. I notice to see more and more ‘one page’ portfolio websites (http://www.onepagefolios.com/) and I like them a lot. You need to create something simple and focused when you only have one page. That’s good. Probably all of the points in this article fit on one page for most freelancers. Contact, about me, hire me, all fit in a single short text in the header or sideline of your site. I think you should be able to show your work with nice large (full screen) images (especially for photographers) and it should be fun to create / update your portfolio.
For people who do not have the skills to design/create a custom portfolio website or just need a practical solution, we’ve created a clean, simple & focused ‘almost one page’ portfolio format, which is very easy to setup and maintain. It’s called http://viewbook.com and you can see examples here: http://www.viewbook.com/tour/portfolio_pages.
So, I’m brand spanking new to the freelance world. I’ve never done any freelance work for anyone, ever. Unless you count writing English term papers for procrastinating Science majors who think writing is “unnecessary” to their future. I would really love if anyone would be willing to share their portfolio with me so I could get some ideas on how to put one of my own together. This article has been immensely helpful for building a site, now I just need some minor assistance figure out exactly what to put in it.
my email is oneprodigalprodigy@live.com if you want to help! 
To add upon what Skellie was saying, there are a lot of great FREE tools on the internet for artists of all abilities, styles and media.
In fact, deviantART.com is about to launch a FREE portfolio tool that includes all the little things that art buyers, hiring managers and art school admission departments look for in layout, background color, and thumbnail preferences. It’s all in the details, folks! Trust dA. They did the research.
If you’re interested, check out a link that the community recently shared with its members:
http://news.deviantart.com/article/84969/
And stay tuned. The portfolio is about to be released.
I hope y’all use it. It just may earn one of you a job!
Dan
Great Article. This is something I really need to work. My hardest part is coming into freelancing and having 90% of the sites be from a marketing agency I worked at for the passed 4 years. No non-disclosures for the win I guess.
I agree with Brian. Carbonmade, deviantART, flickr, they are all very nice to share your work among other artists, inspire each other and get feedback, but it is very unlikely a company will take you seriously as a designer.
A service like viewbook could be a solution to make you look more like a professional, of course there is are a lot of more easy ways to make your online portfolio (http://www.fresh.li to name but one)
But if you really want to earn some money with your work you still need to have a paper portfolio, pick up the phone, make appointments, and go out there
Thanks for the great information, will definitely take this into consideration when updating my website. If anyone wants to see my portfolio it’s http://www.tnpfk.com/.
Thx for the tips
I liked it very much
Thanks 4 share this important article
Very informative article. I am already following some of those tips for my online portfolio. I will be making sure that I am following other tips as well. Cheers.
Thank you very much for this important article.
nice posting boss,..!!
I think these tips are great. The only thing I have a question about, or maybe even a difference of opinion, is with number 6. I think five years ago, or maybe even one year ago, the advice “show off only the skill you are looking to get hired in” would have been 100% accurate. However, in today’s job market – especially in the mass communications field, I think employers want someone that can do a little of everything. I believe it is important to show that you can handle a camera as well as put it into HTML. I don’t think there is any such thing as JUST a writer anymore, or JUST a photographer. People that are successful in today’s world are generally the jack of all trades.
I love these tips though – very useful. I will be incorporating some of them into my own profile!
Thanks!