How to Design a Majestic Website Portfolio?
Portfolio plays a very dominant role in making your freelancing work look fantastic. It can be used to highlight your past and present projects on which you have worked upon in order to encourage clients to hire you.
Now a days, Portfolio isn’t just a collection of work samples. Instead, it’s a golden opportunity for you to showcase:
- Who you are?
- What kind of work you do?
- How you do that work?
- Where you want to go next? and,
- With whom YOU really want to work with?
You must try to design your portfolio in such a way that can really convince a client to hire you as a contractor. Here are the tips that can help you design an impressive portfolio.
1. Customise Your Site Theme or Template
Even though you know how to build a website from scratch, it makes more sense to use a robust platform or Content Management System (CMS) with complex tools built right in.
You can also include your customised site theme or template in your portfolio. Instead of saying “I used my coding skills to build this site” it is better to show the audience the website that you created and designed. This helps people to build trust upon you for the service you provide.
Customising code on a theme or template for the purpose of portfolio has great benefits for designers, developers or freelancers in establishing their brand image and help them gain recognition.
2. Google Yourself
You must have searched yourself on the internet a number of times just to check your existence on the web world. If you have not done that yet, it is the right time to do so.
When you’re just at a budding stage, you might not have a social proof – like blog portfolios and testimonials – to show how awesome you are at coding activity. But you can broaden the scope of what you can include in your portfolio.
Google yourself and see what comes up. There might be a chance that you’ve been and featured more than you might have realised. If you appeared online in a positive light then you can feature it in your portfolio, whether it’s related to tech or not.
3. Get Testimonials
Testimonial is a written declaration certifying a person’s character, conduct, or qualifications, values, knowledge, excellence, etc., that they possess. It is a letter or written statement of recommendation.
Just make sure you feature your own testimonial on your site. This will help people to gain more trust on you and the brand with which you are dealing.
You can get testimonials about other work you’ve done. If you’re changing careers, ask your former coworker to write a few sentences on what working with you was like. And don’t forget to return the favor!
Infographic By Web Design City
For some people especially those people who don’t consider themselves as writers, the thought of composing a testimonial might be a difficult task. But with the help of advanced CMS tools you can easily prepare your own testimonials.
4. Showcase Your Education
It is an important factor to feature your education in the portfolio. You must be able to explain what you have learned in a training program to enhance your skills. It shows what you learned and how dedicated you are towards your new career.
Don’t be shy at featuring other courses you’ve taken even the online free ones or in workshops. This is because, education done in any form can prove to be beneficial.
5. Include All Your Online Projects
Since you have already mentioned your education in testimonials, why not include the work you did while learning your skills? Don’t limit yourself to final projects for major courses. You can include any exercises or projects that are still incomplete.
If you have built an application using JavaScript or jQuery, you can just include a screenshot and link to that application. Also try to put in all the screenshots of the stages when you were planning to build the app, how the application looked before you made it interactive, and even different screen-shots showing certain features and the X-factor of the app.
6. Include Community Involvement.
Another non-digital aspect to point out in your own Website portfolio is your participation in any groups or organisations. If you attend meet-ups, documentations, seminars or are part of professional organizations, it’s pretty much better if you list them.
There might be an important aspect of the group or your role in it – like you created HTML newsletters for your entrepreneurs’ club or maintained the WordPress site for any function in your area. Those are both best examples of you using your technical skills “in real life” as well as working in a team and on different projects that can add up to a real experience in the eyes of people those who are looking forward to hire you.