Your online portfolio can be about anything – Photography, architecture, web designs, fashion designs, interior decorating, car re-modelling, talent management, etc.
The portfolio can be attached to your business website, or it could be an individual online portfolio to present your skills online.
Whatever the type of portfolio you create – here are the 9 tips to make the best of your online portfolio website template.
Choose a clean design
The portfolio is about your work. It doesn’t really need a fancy design. A clean, clutter free design should work best for almost any kind of online portfolio.
A clean design lets the visitor focus on the portfolio items without being distracted by the excess design elements. Your portfolio should also have a confusion free structure and navigation.
Minimal distractions
The distraction can be in form of a decorated header, a big advertisement banner, or any such website element. You may think it just as a part of your website, but it may be a distraction for your visitors.
Cleaner portfolios will draw your visitors attention to where it’s actually needed – the portfolio items. In short, you should have focused pages – that does exactly what they are meant to do. A little formatting is obviously okay, but use the decoration wisely to make sure it doesn’t become a distraction.
Captions on your Portfolio Website Template
When it comes to captions, there is no specific rule for portfolios. You may want a portfolio that displays the portfolio items with a caption, or a simple portfolio with no captions.
However, it totally depends on the topic of your portfolio. If you want to add the captions to your portfolio, you must make sure they are meaningful, short and precise.
Also choose what not to show
It’s important to make sure that you choose he right order of the items to be displayed in your portfolio. However, it is equally important to eliminate the projects that aren’t needed in the portfolio.
For example: In case of a web design agency, remove the designs that aren’t modern and responsive, Or if you are a photographer, you can eliminate the photographs that can cause copyright issues, or any other sensitive subject, etc.
Now, when looking through the specimen of your skills, it won’t be very difficult for you to decide what is best to demonstrate your accomplishments as a professional.
Description & Redirection
Do you want to create a portfolio that talks the details. You can easily create a page for each portfolio item that can talk about the project in detail.
You can add description: What inspired the project, the challenges (if any), processes, or anything you want the visitors to know about your work. This will make your online portfolio not just interesting but also informative.
Choose wisely what to show first
This one is a no-brainier, start with the best you have. Does that sound fair enough?
Instead of randomly showcasing your work across the portfolio, you can properly organize the portfolio items. Keep the best of your work upfront, at the top of the page.
Page loading speed
Whether it is a simple business or a service page of your agency website, or a sales page, or a blog – speed of your website is a big factor in deciding the success of your website.
No one, absolutely no one will wait for your page to take it’s time to slowly load while they keep staring at the screen. Not even you! Therefore, you should always do your best to make sure that the page load times is minimal. You can use the page speed tracking tools like Yslow and gtmetrix to help the speed of your page.
Categorize if necessary
Too many portfolio items on your online portfolio? Then try not to jumble them all up on a single screen.
Instead of stacking everything up in the same page, you can create categories for keeping the items organized. It also adds to the user experience as they can easily choose according to their interest.
Write blogs
An online portfolio is nothing but your professional identity on the internet. So you may as well add an element of interest to your portfolios by adding blogs.
Writing & maintaining blogs on your portfolio website helps in multiple ways: Blogs makes your website interactive, especially with comments enabled – you can know what the users are actually thinking. They also help for SEO as fresh, unique and related content adds to the credibility and relevance of your website.
And at last, blogs are a wonderful way to express yourself, and share your knowledge with your visitors. You can write about your work method, or blog about the latest work, your experience in the field, review an item, etc.
Whatever your online portfolio website is about, you can use a general Business theme with portfolio options. The presentation of your skills through online portfolio is what matters the most.
Hope these tips helps you create beautiful portfolios!!