Where Can I See Your Work? — Creating Online Portfolios & Personal Websites
Hi Jessica,
I’m looking for someone to design me a logo for my startup. I was referred to you by Sara. I was wondering if you could give me a quote. Also, can you send me your portfolio and some references?
Thank you,
Deena
Now, I freelance all the time. I do anything from graphic design to web design to photography to life planning, but in the midst of doing everything for everyone else, I had forgotten to finish my own personal website. Only when I was applying to a fellowship program did I finally get around to building my online portfolio. It was kind of like an “Oh shit!” moment. Now, I do have a LinkedIn and a Levo (kind of like a visual LinkedIn), but my work was sort of scattered throughout the interwebs. Not going to lie, but I too got annoyed when I asked for someone’s portfolio, and they didn’t have something online for me to view. For this article, I’m going to provide you with some options on creating online portfolios and personal websites. I’ll walk you through how to create one as well as what key information or data you should have in them.
Above is my personal website which you can view at www.jessicainnis.com It’s not fully completed. As I said, I’m horrible at focusing on myself, but it’s a really simple custom-built site depicting mainly my current projects, photography, and graphic design. On my contact page, I also have links to my video work on Vimeo, my Medium articles, and my professional Insta.
This is a site that I built for a client separated into her work as a producer, photographer, a speaker, a writer, and her major film project. See how there are multiple components to her site that indicate all the things she does and that she can be hired for. This goes into my first point.
What does your website or online portfolio need to include:
- What You’re Trying to Showcase — On the first page, I should know what you’re about. Is it Art? Film? Global Health? Robotics? Sex Education? What is it that you do? What is your major selling point? I should get a sense of who you are as soon as I see the first page. If I have to guess or wonder, your site is designed poorly. It should be intuitive.
- Who Are You — What is your story? What is your background? What makes you YOU? What are your skills, passions, and experiences? Think of this as your resume but less boring and better designed. It should be as interesting as a creative nonfiction book. You can also include a PDF link to your resume, CV, or pictures from your travels, life, and whatnot. I should be like “Wow! This person is amazing!” Because you are amazing, and everyone has a story to tell.
- Full Portfolio and References — Create a gallery. Embed some images, some video, some yadda yadda. Most importantly, embed HIGH-QUALITY images and videos. Include links to sites or where your work has been featured in, no matter how big or small. This goes for published articles, infographics, and mini clips as well. Try to include captions on all your items. This right here is your proof and CREDIBILITY! No one believes what you tell, only what you show. Additionally, if you can put together a short list of 3–5 on-hands people for references, you are good. You don’t need to post the references info on your site. In fact, I’d advise against it, but if you can references prepped ahead for any situation, you’ll never worry about someone springing up that question. Make sure your references cover various areas of your work if you do multiple things.
- How Do I Contact You — Do you have a contact form or an email address? I suggest both. I hate forms, but I still include one on sites. What are your other social media platforms where you can be found? Something not often considered is your press presence. Have you been interviewed for TVs, newsletters, or magazines? Something I probably won’t get into is press kits, but I highly suggest having them prepared as you build your brand.
- What Is Your Current Project — If you look at other influencers’ sites or portfolios, they all have some project that they are currently working on or trying to promote. What is it that you’re working on right now? An Initiative? A Documentary? An Art Series? Whatever you’re currently trying to push, include it, if necessary and possible.
Great! Now that I’ve gotten you through the points. Let’s talk about actually building and creating the page.
As for options, let’s list a few recommendations:
- Levo (www.levo.com, automatically connected to LinkedIn but currently under re-development…)
- Google Drive (Yes, this is so possible and super easy to do!)
Above is the Google Drive for my non-profit org I’m working on, RethinxIT. I’ll also have a simple WordPress for it at www.rethinxit.wordpress.com, which I’ll talk more about third-party web builder sites soon. Anyways, Google Drive is immensely powerful providing you with 15GB of storage free to use and easy sharing and organizational capabilities. Above, I listed all the things that you should have, and I’ll tell you how to do that all in Google Drive.
First, using Google Slides, create a presentation about yourself. Title it “About ‘Insert Name Here’”.
Second, create separate folders for all your projects. For example, “Visual Art”, “Poetry”, and “Photography”. In each folder, include High-Quality images, videos, and etc.
Third, create a folder labeled “Contact & Press Kit” with a Google Doc of all your contact info and social media handles. Include headshots, basic info, a short bio, and recent press.
Fourth, include either a video, image, infographic, or presentation on your current project that you want other people to know about.
Boom! There goes your low-tech, online portfolio that you can build for yourself in a couple of days or less. You can put it all in a separate folder on your drive as “Portfolio” and limit the share settings to view only for the entire folder.
3. Third-Party Web Builder Site (Squarespace, Wordpress, Weebly, etc.)
So you want something a little bit more spiffy! Now, you can build a site in a third-party developer yourself. Most of them are drag/drop and include mobile optimized CSS layouts. However, if you would like more advanced features, you may need some knowledge on HTML, CSS & JS. So if you’re not tech savvy at all, I would avoid the advanced features or hire someone to do it for you.
Note, these are NOT free. You do have to pay for these services if you want a custom domain name. Each of these sites have various plans with various prices and do host limitations on the amount of data that they can host. Wordpress, with a custom domain, can vary from $4-$25/month depending on the plan. I would suggest $8/month plan. Squarespace plans vary from $12-$40/month. I would suggest the $12/month plan billed annually. I don’t usually use Weebly, but the pricing plans are $5-$38/month. To decide which one to use, I’d suggest looking at each of them and pick what best suits your needs. For those who need to upload video clips, I’d choose Squarespace.
A great thing about these is that blogs are easy to create and stats are super simple to obtain. Although you can also embed Google Analytics into your site.
4. Custom-Built & Designed(Either You or Higher a Designer)
Building a site from scratch? If you’re a web developer, just get it done an over with. If you’re not, expect to pay moola for it because custom sites for clients can range greatly. If you want animations and a ton of Javascript elements, a custom-built site is your best bet. If you’re very set on your site being fully customizable, then this is your best option. I can’t really give many tips on this other than I suggest looking at some responsive CSS templates, finding a good hosting provider (I like HostMonster), and using Atom for editing your code to start. If you’re old school, kind of like me, you could still be using Adobe Dreamweaver. There are numerous resources online at GitHub, W3Schools, and Code Academy to help you get the ball rolling. This could be a great yet hectic learning experience. If you don’t have the time for this. I highly suggest just hiring someone or using a third party website builder.
Hopefully, with all of this, you can have some direction on building your online portfolio and/or personal website. Thank you so much for reading! I know that this article is comparatively long although I think it’s by far one of the most important ones I’ve written so far. Please clap, share, and subscribe. Until next time ❤
