How to Get Started with Your Portfolio
If you offer creative services, having a website that works as a portfolio is almost mandatory. Although platforms such as LinkedIn or Instagram can be used to reach a wide audience and show the projects you have worked on, having your portfolio on your website has some advantages:
- You have much more control over the form and content you display on your site.
- You can benefit from the seo of the site to attract more people and find your portfolio.
- Your visitors can go from the portfolio to your service or contact page in one place.
All this makes having your portfolio on your website highly recommended, but it is not just about uploading any project and that’s it: creating a good portfolio requires a bit of strategic thinking behind it, so let’s see some points to keep in mind.
1. Cure your portfolio
One of the most common problems with portfolios is wanting to include everything we’ve done when, in reality, a portfolio should be a slightly more strategic selection of content. You can also create your portfolio using Portfolio website builder.
When creating your portfolio, keep the following in mind:
- Choose the jobs that you like the most or that make you feel the most pride.
- Select the projects that are most similar to the type of projects you want to do in the future.
- If you don’t have any such projects or are in the midst of a change in direction or style with your work, create personal or fictional projects that reflect the creative direction you want to go in the future.
2. Don’t neglect the presentation of your projects
In this case, I consider how important the form is as well as the content: we want your pieces to stand out, and a design that helps to achieve this is essential.
If you use Squarespace for your website, you already have a little advantage: it is a platform that pays a lot of attention to design and that works very well for sites with visual load. In addition, in the latest version (7.1) it includes a particular page type for portfolios .
You can even take as a starting point for your site some of the templates they have specially designed for portfolios. You can see the general selection selection for portfolios , and a particular selection for photographers , although I consider that both work very well for any type of portfolio.
Related : How to choose a template for your website in Squarespace
On the other hand, if you are on Squarespace 7.0, you can create a portfolio within a blog in two ways:
Adding the tag “Portfolio” to the corresponding posts and showing only those posts on a separate page with the help of a summary block.
Creating a new blog that works only as a portfolio.
Control over the design is one of the advantages of having your portfolio hosted on a website, instead of in spaces like Behance or Instagram where you have a predetermined and rigid way of presenting your work.
3. Present your work in an attractive way
Continuing along the line of taking care of the design and presentation of your works, I want to give you a very special recommendation: try, as long as it is according to the type of work you do, to present your pieces with Mockups.
