3: Tips. how to design your portfolio website
When designing your portfolio site, start off with a positive impacting home page (entry page). This is the first impression visitors get, and they will only spend a few seconds before deciding whether to stay on your site or not. So with the entry page you need to say who you are and what you do. According to usability gurus, people do not like reading lots of text on home pages - they make snap judgements and only skim read the text. So consider how you can communicate what you do visually as well as with text.
If you have several galleries of work, you should consider creating direct links to those galleries from your entry page. A good rule to remember is to minimize the number of clicks the viewer has to make to navigate through your site.
Next, you may want to create a biography (profile) page to fill in some background information about yourself and your work. Be brief and to the point. Consider creating further pages rather than trying to fit too much content on a single page. It is often sensible to create a separate contact page for example. Our advice is to stick to a consistent template for a series of information pages. Electrofolio has several custom page templates to choose from which makes this easy.
You should avoid distracting visitors from your website content. The biggest distraction is advertising. Electrofolio never puts ads on your web pages. Another common distraction is social networking tools or feedback posts under your work. This feature, popular with many online portfolio systems, is rarely useful in promoting your work. More often, it trivializes your work and brings down the tone of your website to something less than professional.
When choosing a colour scheme, use neutral tones whenever possible.This will help visitors to focus on what is really important - the content of your website and the quality of your work.
Consider the number of images you are showing per gallery. It would be wise to limit the number to around 20 for a comfortable uncluttered viewing experience. It is better to split up your work into several galleries rather than putting too many slides into one gallery.
Try to identify which pieces of your work are most popular, and put those pieces near the start of your gallery. This will minimize the risk of your visitors missing some of your best work, and help keep people on your site.
Finally, keep in mind the main purpose of your online portfolio: it is to open new doors, to gain new potential clients or contacts and ultimately to further your career.
Importance of having an online portfolio