October 17th, 2007
How To Structure Your Online Portfolio
I recently did a redesign of my web design business site. Early in the process I visited the portfolio sites of a lot of other web designers. It was very inspiring to see so many different approaches to displaying examples of one’s work. I did notice one trend that was a little disturbing. Happily the majority of sites did not go down this path, but I saw it more than I expected.
I saw far too many sites that were giving visitors a massive dump of every site the designer had done in the last 5 years. The portfolio in these cases was a giant list of company names or thumbnails. It almost appeared as though they thought a customer was going to choose a web developer based on the number of projects they had done.
I think it’s definitely a good idea to let your customers know that you’ve got experience, but no one is going to check out every link on your list of the last 50 sites you’ve done. I would suggest trimming down the list to just show some of the best examples of your work.
Maybe you want to show your customers how many diverse things you can do: logo design, shopping carts, content management, blogs, discussion boards, live chat, and video. I agree that you should tell your visitors you can do all these things, but a giant list of sites isn’t going to accomplish anything.
Many sites displayed a long list of clients. When you clicked on a client, you would see the services provided. For one client it was a site design and a blog. For another client it was a content management system. The problem with this setup is that I would need to view each client to know that I had seen the entire list of services you offer. How many of your visitors do you think actually do that?
Why not instead group your past work by the services you did? Have a page with a paragraph that explains shopping carts and then has links to the clients for which you’ve done shopping carts. You can still show how much you have to offer, but you don’t have to give your visitors a giant brain dump that no one wants to sort through.
