Web design businesses are growing in demand. Businesses realize that instead of hiring a web designer, they can buy a relatively cheaper package from a web design company and get a variety of ready-to-use website templates to choose from. This is causing the shift in demand and focus from individual web developers and web designers to companies with a complete web design portfolio.
If you offer web design services and do not want to lose out in the game, you need to build a web design portfolio. This portfolio will serve as your calling or business card, as well as your art gallery. It will be where your skills will be showcased, and your stories will be shared with your prospective clients. You can use it to approach new clients, present during meetings to pitch your services and make it a platform to reveal testimonials from your satisfied clients.A web design portfolio shows what you have done in your field in the past, what kind of projects you are handling currently, and what you plan to do next. Many freelancers create stunning web design portfolios that they present in the form of an art gallery, with proper contact information for prospects to get in touch with them. Once you prepare your portfolio, you do not need any other material to reveal your web designing skills and talent to the world. It will be the only thing somebody would need to see before deciding whether or not to avail of your services or offer you a project proposal.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
You can think of your web design portfolio as your online advertisement, which can be shown to the audience offline as well in the form of printouts or downloaded files. The best web design portfolios are presented in the form of a portfolio website.
In this post, we will discuss how to build an awesome web design portfolio. You need to keep in mind certain things to make sure your portfolio is appealing enough to attract good quality clients. Towards the end, we will give you a few tips for creating a design portfolio website.
Things That are Included in the Best Web Design Portfolios
Here are several things that all stunning web design portfolios have in them.
1. Screenshots of Websites You Have Designed in the Past
This is the most important element of your web design portfolio. The audience needs to see what the websites look like that you designed. It is also preferable to include links to those websites so that the audience can visit them live and check out their functionality. They might want to check if they are responsive and easy to navigate. A lot about a site’s functionality and responsiveness depends on its web design more than its actual development.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Testimonials From Some of Your Satisfied Clients
If you have any positive testimonials from your past or existing clients, those can serve you well in marketing your services. Make sure you include them in your portfolio to flaunt how well you do your job. Testimonials work as effective recommendations and are an even more robust marketing tool than paid advertisements. Your adverts might appear biased or pushy to your audience, but testimonials will be seen as authentic and first-hand information about the quality of your services.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. A Brief Description of Your Skills and Services
You have to convey what you can and cannot do to the audience of your web design portfolio in a precise and transparent way. If you offer a wide range of web designing services, split them into different categories and explain. Good service providers clarify what they can hold in their bucket and what they do generally not include from the get-go. Doing this will improve the transparency and communication between you and your prospective clients.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Information on How Flexible You Can be with Your Work
Since we live in a digitized world, you might come across some clients who prefer a different communication style or a differently structured agreement contract. In running a business, you need to maintain a certain level of flexibility in these matters so that it’s easy for you to deal with all kinds of clients. You never know if someone with a completely different coordination style on projects brings the highest value business for you. Therefore, it is better to include some information in your web design portfolio on how you offer flexibility to your diversified pool of clients.
5. Means of Contacting You Online and Offline
If someone is interested in your services, they would want to contact you. You shouldn’t give them a chance to procrastinate getting in touch with you when it comes to that. Include your complete business contact details in your portfolio. The best web design portfolios include multiple contact details, such as a phone number, email address, a live chat feature, or a contact form. The more instant forms of contact you provide, the more convenient your audience will get in touch with you.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Tips for Creating a Design Portfolio Website
As mentioned earlier, the best platform to present your web design portfolio is a portfolio website. But for your website to be effective, it needs to have certain traits and characteristics. It should not be a place that puts off its visitors. It needs to be user-friendly and attractive. Here are a few tips for creating your portfolio website in a way that attracts customers.
1. Choose a Relevant Website Template
Since you are offering web design services, the template that you use to build your site should be simply fantastic. It should look beautiful and offer all the features that you need to upload your portfolio pictures, details, and links. It should also allow you to add or embed videos from third-party video hosting sites, such as Youtube and Vimeo. You can create a tutorial or explainer video for your services and add it to your portfolio website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you build your web design portfolio website on Strikingly, you’ll get all these features. Our free plan provides all the features you need to create a basic portfolio site. You can add all your content using our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor interface. You can add photos and videos to your web pages by clicking ‘Add New Section’ from the left panel on the editor and selecting ‘Big Media’. Your images portfolio can also be built using the ‘Gallery’ section.
Image taken from Strikingly
We have too many options for our users who build a portfolio website on our platform. The best part of creating a site on Strikingly is that it only takes a couple of hours. You don’t need to do any programming or write even a single line of code. All the tools are ready to use and get your site up and running faster than you can imagine.
2. Provide a Smooth Browsing Experience to Your Site Visitors
Your portfolio website should not only be attractive and responsive but also smooth flowing. If its page loading speed is slow or has technical errors in its functionality, you would get a high bounce rate. This means your site visitors would quit your site without going through it properly. When someone leaves a website out of irritation, the chances of them returning to your web design portfolio are very slim. That’s why it is better that you do everything that’s in your control to make sure your site visitors get to have an easy-going browsing experience on your site.
3. Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
This is actually part of the previous point. Make your website easy to navigate by including clear call-to-action buttons, links, a prominent menu bar, and perhaps a site map as well. If your site visitor wants to go from one page to another, they should be able to figure out where to click. Work on your site’s navigation.
4. Upload High-Quality Photos and Screenshots
Make sure all the web design portfolio photos and screenshots that you upload are of high quality. It is unnecessary to upload pictures in high resolution, as that might hurt your page loading speed. But the pictures mustn’t be blurry so that the beauty of your portfolio can be vivid and clear.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Use the Most Modern Forms of Contact
Build a contact page and a contact form for your site visitors to get in touch with you. Merely publishing your phone number and email address wouldn’t attract many queries. Site visitors usually find it more convenient to submit a contact form entry, as they can do that easily without coming out of your site. An even better form of contact is to build a live chat feature on your site.
If you build your web design portfolio site on Strikingly, you can add live chat to it to allow your prospects to contact you during any hour of the day. This makes your communication with your prospects speedy and effective.
Strikingly was developed with the ease of use of our users in mind. We do everything that’s in our control to ensure a smooth browsing experience of your website for your audience. The motive is to provide you with such a website-building experience that you feel tension-free to focus on the other aspects of your business. We take care of any technical issues you might face on your site and allow all our users to contact us via our live chat to convey any such problems.
Many of our users are running successful portfolio websites on our platforms. We believe that if they can do it, you can do it too!
