Having a large body of work comes with its own set of pros and cons. Sure, it shows you’re an experienced photographer. But there’s only so much weight you can carry around in your portfolio before your back starts hurting — an impressive range can be difficult to showcase.
But here’s the deal — while it’s perfectly advisable to have a couple of physical copies of your photos, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t digitize your entire portfolio and put it online. A digital portfolio is much easier to manage and show to other people, and it gives you options that would be simply impractical with physical portfolios.
Having an online portfolio is a must in this digital age. If you’re looking to build your first one, or if you think the one you already have could use some love, here are five rules you should have in mind when creating an effective photography portfolio.
Make the Important Decisions Early On
Your portfolio is, at its core, just a website, one among millions. The world’s been filling up with websites for a while now, and we’ve had the time to figure out the things that work better than others.
That’s why rule number one is to make all the critical decisions early on. Find good hosting that will make things like installing WordPress and taking care of your website easier. Spend some time thinking about the domain name — your first and last name are obvious choices, but if you have a branded alias, it might work even better.
Think about additional things you might want to do with your website. These are the choices you’ll have to make before you put any actual work into building the portfolio.
Choose a Good WordPress Theme
If you’re using WordPress for your portfolio, and you might as well because it is the world’s premier content management system, you should make full use of the fact that WordPress allows easy customization with themes.
A WordPress theme is a package that contains building elements, pre-made pages, layout blueprints, and even plugins that extend your portfolio’s functionality. There are specific types of themes for different types of websites. You’ll easily find a bunch of photography WordPress themes to use for a portfolio.
Common sense dictates that you should pick a theme that doesn’t draw attention away from your work. Minimalist themes are a usual choice, but don’t think there’s no variety to them — you’d be surprised by how much time you can sink into researching minimalist portfolio themes. It can be a lot of fun, too.
Create a Selection with Purpose and Consistency
Here are a couple of obvious things that deserve to be stated repeatedly. Your portfolio is not a dumpsite for every photo you’ve ever created. It’s also not there so you can showcase your personal favorites. And it most certainly isn’t a place for uploading photos and forgetting about them.
A portfolio is not storage. It’s a collection of carefully picked photos you should meticulously arrange to ensure they land well with the viewers and create the desired effect. It’s important to always have a purpose or a theme in mind and to stick to one theme at a time.
For example, you can choose only one segment of your work — let’s say food photography — and make your portfolio only about that. Or you can create a portfolio that covers several neatly separated and arranged fields of work — food, event, and architecture photography, for example. What you can’t do is have a color photo of a muffin in a portfolio that’s only black-and-white street photos.
Make It Viewer-Oriented
There are lots of talks in the business world about how to boost customer-centricity. It’s an approach that puts the customer — the end-user, in your case the viewer — into the center and builds processes, assets, and whole products around them in a way that maximizes the quality of their experience.
What does that have to do with your portfolio? One important thing — it should make you look at your portfolio from the standpoint of the person you want to look at it. That should inform some of the choices you make regarding your portfolio.
For one, you should make your portfolio easy to navigate. Also, if you picked and arranged your photos carefully, it’s less likely your viewers will find your work confusing. Finally, you should make your portfolio shareable and findable, which could include everything from putting its address on your calling card to figuring out what SEO is, or how social networks can help you.
Put Yourself — Not Only Your Work — Out There
Your body of work speaks for itself, but it doesn’t have to speak for you. It might not convey your story too well, or your interests and work history, or a broader context in which you’re creating photos. Only you can do that.
That’s what the “About Me” page was invented for. This page is a staple on lists of things to consider when creating a portfolio for a good reason. You can use that page in different ways. It can be a place for a short biography, or a list of references and past assignments, or a place where you write about the things that inspire your work.
And don’t forget about the “Contact” page, either — you want people to be able to get in touch if they like what they see and read. Give them a way to reach out to you. You can give them a form, an email address, or even a phone number.
Conclusion
An online photography portfolio can be one of the most useful assets you can have no matter how far along you are in your career. But to get the most out of it, you need to take building your portfolio seriously. Everything from its name, to the WordPress theme you use for it, and the way you arrange your photos can contribute towards making it a successful tool for self-promotion. These rules will help you make better choices but remember that they only work if you invest time, effort, and probably some money into making a good portfolio. So good luck!
