It is important and professional in the digital age to have an online portfolio. It is also easier for industry to see who you are and what you do. What I didn’t understand until now it is that an online portfolio it is actually a website and such, it has different sections to consider. The first is an ‘About me’ section with photographs, to show who is behind the designs, part of our personality and other details. At all time be careful that the website doesn’t have any grammar error so always double check, maybe even with somebody else.
ABOUT ME PAGE:
- Section about background, designs and processes (people love to see a story behind all these points)
- Awards and competitions, or been nominated for shortlists etc. Every little achievement counts
- Featured on magazines, blogs and books (when confident with a certain style or amount of work, contact bloggers and ask to be featured on their websites)
- Any collaborations of clients that we worked with
CONTACT PAGE
Single page, include eventually an online form, an email address, faqs and make it interesting as well
PORTFOLIO PAGE
It can be the home page or a section of the website where to upload all or part of our designs.
PRIVATE PAGES
We can make some online pages private. They are password protected and you can give the password to selected customers from the industry that have shown a real interest in the designs and want to see the entire collection. This mainly happens especially in a later stage where the big load of new work can be hidden from the competition.
YOUR OWN URL
Buying one means that we take our design career seriously. It won’t look as professional otherwise. The best option is to name it after ourselves, or anyway the brand name we chose to be recognized by, so it is easier to find it in the Google research. There are several companies where to buy the domain name and it only costs around 10£ per year: 34sp.com, Go daddy, Squarespce, 123-reg.co.uk. For example I bought mine some months ago from GoDaddy.com .
SOCIAL MEDIA
Preferably it would have the same name as the brand and all social media so it is easier to find. Consistency of name looks professional.
PROTECT WORK
Watermark images with own name so whoever decides to spread our designs through internet people can always see the name of the Designer. It is also important to put the copyright in the website.
FREE WEBSITES:
- Adobe Spark, the simplest one, one page that allows to add multiple photographs. It probably doesn’t allow to have a personal url but it is a great place to start;
- Wix has a simple layout, but we don’t need too much and too complex, the work should speak for itself;
- WordPress: The sketch theme is quite appropriate for work like ours. It can be used easily just by copying and pasting some lines of code to create a more personal layout. It can also be used by programmers to create a more complex website;
- Squarespace is 10£/m, more complex
- Format is specialized in portfolios, seems to be photographers choice, more sophisticated.
- Spark is very simple to use. It has limited options but it does the job: click on the plus button to add a template, than add titles, subtitles and images.
Researching your competitors to see what they are doing and how we can take elements that work out better for us.
I bought my domain name as http://www.miladyanda.com on GoDaddy and connected it for now with WordPress. I am planning in having my About page, portfolio, contact and blog as the main menu and relevant filters for the portfolio and blog articles.
Anda Avramescu 