Show Off: 6 Portfolio Website Design Tips Your Need

Roughly 1.57 billion people worldwide work as freelancers.

If you provide a freelance service, having a portfolio website is one of the best ways to get new clients. When building your site, you want to make sure it stands out. Coming up with an innovative portfolio website design isn’t easy, but there are several things you can do to ensure yours catches the attention of potential clients.

For 6 key portfolio website tips to get yourself noticed, keep reading.

1. Showcase Your Work

Your previous work will be the backbone of your portfolio website. If you look at different portfolio website examples, you’ll see people presenting their work in various ways. When building a portfolio, make sure you showcase it in a way that quickly catches people’s attention.

The first few seconds that people spend on your site are crucial. If you can quickly get people interested, they’ll be much more inclined to look into your site in detail.

Some ways that people do this is to present their work using videos, slideshows, or thumbnail galleries. Bear in mind that animations and good use of color will stand out to people – but you don’t want to go over the top. If you need some inspiration, check out these portfolio design ideas.

2. Provide Testimonials

While showing your best work is crucial, there’s another aspect that some clients will consider just as important. They may want to know what your previous clients think of you, and how their experience was.

Even if someone provides the best work available, there could be other issues. A client won’t want to work with someone who is a poor communicator, misses deadlines, or is generally unhelpful.

If you provide some positive testimonials on your site, visitors will see that people have had a good experience when working with you. This is one of the most effective ways to build confidence in new clients, as they’ll trust that you can provide a good service.

You don’t need to list every positive testimonial you receive. It’s a good idea to take a few of the best and add them to your homepage so that visitors can see them when they first look at your site.

3. Use a CTA

You can have a great portfolio website, but if you don’t have a solid CTA (call to action) you could end up missing out on a lot of clients. When building your site, think about what you ultimately want your visitors to do. You then need to create a firm CTA that encourages this.

A typical CTA would aim to get people to sign up for a newsletter, or book a consultation call, for example. Make sure the CTA is clearly visible, and you shouldn’t make it too pushy.

On top of this, you also want to provide multiple ways for people to contact you. Offering more options will be beneficial as some people might not like to communicate through certain channels. Some standard methods are email and phone, but you can add things like WhatsApp and other social media channels if you’d like.

4. Establish a Blog

The best portfolio websites don’t just encourage people to invest in services, they provide value to their visitors. A blog is an excellent way to do this. You can create regular blog posts that focus on topics that are related to your industry.

Blogs are great for SEO. People who are using search engines to help with problems or questions that they have will visit sites that they think can help them. If yours can, it will bring in a lot more traffic.

On top of this, providing high-quality blogs can help establish authority for your brand. This will further help with your search engine rankings. There’s also a good chance that you’ll gain new clients who stumble upon your website when performing web searches, and who would otherwise have not found your site.

5. Don’t Slack on the Writing

The core of your website is your portfolio, but you want to ensure you talk about your work too. Provide visitors with more information related to both your portfolio and you as a whole. After all, they don’t want to work with your portfolio, they want to work with you.

It can be a good idea to put some information about yourself even before your portfolio of work. Tell visitors who you are, and what you do. This can help build a more personal connection straight away.

6. Trim the Fat

You’ll spend a lot of time on your website design. Perfecting your layout, choosing what work to present, and a range of other tasks may take hours or even days. Despite this, you need to bear in mind that most potential clients will spend only seconds looking at your portfolio.

Because of this, you should ensure it only contains what you need. Go through everything and make sure you take out anything that clients won’t care to see. Sometimes less is more, and by just keeping the essentials, visitors will be able to quickly see everything they need and get an idea of whether or not they want to work with you.

Overloading your website will quickly put people off, and they might miss important details. Finding the right balance can be difficult, but once you’ve got it you’ll find it much easier to get new clients.

Your Portfolio Website Design

It may take some time to come up with the perfect portfolio website design, but once you’ve landed on it, your business will quickly start to grow. Make sure you focus on getting people’s attention, showing them what’s important, and giving them good reasons to want to work with you.

For more digital marketing articles, check out some of our other blog posts.