What if your client asks you to show your portfolio online? Which is a professional and preferable way to present your work? The answer to both these questions is a graphic design portfolio. Having a design portfolio can be a game-changer for your career as you can showcase your expertise and professionalism. You can create a graphic design portfolio website using WordPress.
Here we give a step-by-step guide to a graphic design portfolio website. Let’s start from scratch and find out why you need a portfolio website.
Why should you create a graphic portfolio website?
A study has found that 56% of hiring managers prefer applicants who have included their websites along with the job applications. A graphic portfolio website with an appealing display can act as a powerful tool to promote your work and build a brand. It is fair to mention that even if you are not a renowned graphic designer, you should have a portfolio website from day one.
Let’s dig deep into how to build a graphic design portfolio website and go through the key points to consider.
Graphic Design Portfolio- Tips to Build It
1. Little Research, Lot of Inspiration
As a designer, you are eager to show your work to the world through a website, but it is imperative to do a little research on other artists’ portfolios and market trends. You can also go through some popular portfolios to get an idea of how you can come up with an attractive graphic design portfolio. Through a little research, you can get inspired and get answers to the questions like what type of work should be displayed and how does the navigation work?
You can make your landing page of a portfolio website attractive by taking various things into consideration and using your aesthetic sense. Your research can assist you to compile a list of necessary features and functionality you want in your graphic design portfolio website.
2. Consider Your Target Audience
While making a graphic design portfolio, you need to keep the target audience in mind and ponder upon the expectations of visitors. In other words, you need to integrate features and functionality in the portfolio website according to the end user’s requirements and expectations. If you build a website in WordPress, various customized plugins are available for adding different features and functionality. For example, the portfolio designer plugin is one of the best available plugins for creating unique and mobile-friendly galleries to design portfolio sites.
The portfolio designer plugin offers four popular layout styles- Grid, Masonry, Slider, and Justify. It assists you to come up with an attractive and user-friendly portfolio.
Whether you want to get a job as a designer or a project, you can simply insert an email or a link to the downloadable resume in an ‘About’ section. It gives a better experience to employers or entrepreneurs.
3. Choose Right Platform
WordPress and Joomla are robust CMS or web development platforms for portfolio design websites. However, WordPress has a slight upper hand over other peers with improved flexibility, enhanced functionality, and a lot of user-friendly features. Many WordPress plugins and themes make this platform a preferred choice for developing a design portfolio website.
Whatever platform you choose, you need to ensure that it is customizable enough to modify in the future to maintain the creative flow.
Also Read: What Are The Characteristics Of A Powerful Portfolio Website?
After going through the necessary initial tips, you may ask a question- which are the key factors to consider and what to include in your graphic design portfolio? Read on to know the answer.
What to Include in Your Graphic Design Portfolio Website?
1. Demonstrate Your Skills
As a graphic designer, you can make the most of your portfolio to demonstrate your expertise and capabilities. You can pick a unique name if you do not want to use your own name. Be it a logo or description, every aspect of your graphic design website should be user-friendly and attractive to engage visitors.
2. Reveal Accomplishments
You tend to write all the skills in your resume, right? Similarly, you need to treat your portfolio. Whether you have the experience to design a logo or a landing page, it is better to show them in your design portfolio. Also, if you have worked with several companies in the past, it is better to include them all.
3. Showcase Best Work
A graphic design portfolio offers you an opportunity to show your talent as a designer. Therefore, you should include your best work at the beginning and at the end of your website. It will help you engage visitors from the very first page till the last page. Here it is fair to mention that you include current or recent projects as featured projects because such projects can keep your website’s visitors updated with your latest skillset.
4. Include Case Studies
It is even more appealing if you add case studies to your website. You can share who the client was and how your design work assisted the client. You can also include a timeline of various projects and explain which challenges you faced while accomplishing complex projects. Also, you can mention whether the client was happy with the first draft or you had to make some tweaks. Simply put, you can add some insights about the project and enables readers to see your creativity.
5. Provide Necessary Information
In your design portfolio website, you should add your name, phone number, and other contact details so that viewers can see them. You can also include social media details in your websites for enhanced connectivity with your prospective and existing clients. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are useful platforms that can help you expand your reach.
Top Tips for Creating Great Graphic Design Websites
1. Add Sliders
A graphic design portfolio website based on WordPress can attract many people by adding sliders and galleries wisely. Irrespective of the theme of your website, you can add stylish galleries and sliders using an excellent slider plugin.
2. Add Testimonials
If you have already done several design projects before developing a design portfolio website, you can add the client’s testimonials. It can give visitors the feeling that they should assign you a project. However, it is better to keep in mind that there is no need to show off everything you have ever done. Visitors have not much time to spend on your website, and therefore, you should show them only useful stuff.
3. Customize Website
WordPress has a lot of themes and plugins available for customization. All you need to contact a reliable WordPress development company and customize themes or plugins as per the business needs. What’s more, page builder plugins enable you to build your unique layouts, portfolios, and landing pages with the help of drag-and-drop editors. You can customize your website without writing the code using the page builder plugin.
Useful Read: Essential WordPress Plugins For Web Designers
Concluding Remarks
In a nutshell, it is fair to mention that your graphic design portfolio is the best representative of your work and designing skills. You need to remember that there is no need to show off everything you have done in the portfolio. Instead, you can put the best of your work in a user-friendly way. Also, you should avoid excessive submenus and keep your portfolio website updated regularly. You can make the most of it by sharing it on various social media platforms.
Solwin Infotech is a renowned WordPress and Magento web development company. We have built many business websites across different industry verticals to date. Whether you want to make your existing WordPress more advanced with customized WordPress plugins or build a new website from scratch, Solwin can be your preferred choice with many years of collective experience and domain expertise.
Simply drop us a line at info@solwininfotech.com and we will get back to you soon.