Portfolio Website Guide

• In terms of showcasing your work to the world, not having a website is a bit like being lost at sea without a life jacket and whistle. How is anyone supposed to find you? 
• As well as the flexibility and freedom to curate your online persona, a portfolio website is one of the most practical and memorable ways to share your work with press, potential collaborators or employers. 

Representing Yourself online

• Deciding to create your own website is pretty exciting. It means you’ve already done the hard bit: You have a handful of work you’re proud of, and that you’re ready to share. 
• Consider all the platforms you’re already using online. You might have an Instagram account, or several. You might also have a LinkedIn profile.
• Collectively, all of these touch-points make up your ‘online presence’, and individually, they represent different sides of your practice and personality.
• This means that when people are searching for you online, they could find themselves landing on any one of those touch-points.
• Being searchable is a good thing, but you want to make sure it’s for the right reasons.
• Your portfolio website is a chance to control and curate the way you want to be seen and perceived. 
• It means that an employer’s first impression of you is the one you want them to have, rather than the one Facebook decides to show them.
• A portfolio site is a chance to put your best foot forward, and give recruiters, employers or collaborators an understanding who you are as a creative, regardless of your discipline.

Michael Bierut is a partner at New York-based design consultancy Pentagram in New York. Like many other employers, when he’s looking at portfolio sites, he naturally likes to see great work that’s been “beautifully documented and carefully presented. But I also like to get a sense of the personality of the designer behind the work,” he adds. “Make your site distinctive, but also make sure it’s understandable (at minimum) and compelling (ideally) to someone who’s never met you. The visitor should want to meet you in person!”

Finding your purpose and making a plan

Think back to your online presence and all the different ways you’re currently representing yourself online. What role does your website play within that? For example:

• One clear destination for your work to live
• A playful demonstration of your skills
• A drive people to a shop, blog or social media profiles

What pages do I need to build?

These will make up the different layers of your site. These are some good starting points:

HomepageA landing page, the first thing your visitor sees.

‘About Me’ or ‘Biography’ pageThis can include a short statement about your practice, where you studied or worked, or what you’re interested in.

Contact pageThis should contain essential info, such as your email address (with a working link!) and social media links. As web designer Craig Jackson puts it, “Don’t take people on a treasure hunt to find your contact details!”

Project pagesThese tend to consist of images, GIFs or videos alongside a caption describing the project and listing fellow contributors or credits. How might you tell the story of your project?

• It sounds obvious, but when it comes to curation, choose your very best work. Don’t be tempted to include dozens of projects and remember that you’re only as good as your worst project.
• Michael also advises prioritising finished work on your website: “I find that preliminary sketches and other process documentation works best in a live conversation."
• The less-is-more mentality also applies to the images you choose to upload and the words you write to accompany them. Massive images can be a nightmare to load, so Rifke Sadleir advises you to save non-transparent images as jpegs and reduce the quality rather than the resolution.
• Communicate what the work is and your role in it clearly, in small, bitesize chunks. Don’t have page after page of text – just enough to inform your visitor.

Design: What it's going to look like

• Thinking about the nature of your own work is a great starting point. What kind of style or design aesthetic might complement your projects?
• Do you want your work to take centre stage, or do you want the way your website behaves to do the talking? 
• There is nothing wrong with showing breadth, you just need to consider categorising your projects “so they don’t all appear on the same page at once” and cause confusion.
•  You can try drawing wireframes to plan the layout of your pages, and what links you might need and where. This will help put you in the mind of your visitor, and their journey as they go through your website.

The Technical bit: Getting your site online

• Build your site from scratch, or even team up with a friend who can code or collaborate with a developer. 
• There’s a misconception that using a template means you risk your website looking like everyone else’s. But you can change everything from the typeface, layout, image size to background, colours, menus and more.

How to maximise the sites potential

• One way to do this is of course sharing it on social media.
• Having good SEO helps search engines like Google find your site and make it appear higher on the results when someone searches you online. 

Updating your site

• It might seem premature to start thinking about reworking your website but knowing when to update it is an important consideration. 
• A lot of designers get lazy and never update their projects, so things can get stale quite fast.
• You want to make sure that your site continues to represent your practice as your career progresses, so keep it up-to-date where you can.
• A website...is inherently unfinished. It’s imperfect...but that’s the beauty of it. Websites are living, temporal spaces.