How to create a website or online portfolio for your work

by Leo Wiles
08 September 2014

Following my cadetship back in the 1990s, the way to land a job was to send out resumes with physical cuts or grainy photocopies or scour the newspaper job sections and wait for a phone call. Fast forward to 2014 – and we’re using words like personal branding and thinking about how to create a website (if we haven’t already).

Which is why Rachel’s List was asked to talk to the ASA authors and journos last week about the importance of websites and online portfolios, while also demystifying the process as being too expensive, too hard and too time consuming. Here are some key take home messages for those of you who were unable to make it (plus a brief recap for those lovely folks I met last week). And because it is such a big topic, look out for future Ask us Wednesday blog posts about the dos and don’ts of online presentation, when to hire a designer etc.

If you’re not online, you’re essentially invisible to potential customers, especially if you’re heading into content writing or the digital marketplace. Let’s face it: the first thing you do when you’re trying to locate someone is to Google them, so it’s career suicide not to exist online. However, there’s no point asking prospective employees to track down your work from the four corners of cyberspace because they won’t have the time or inclination. Worst still, they might be digging up pieces that no longer reflect who you are professionally.

LinkedIn still rules the roost with RL members and journos at large as the online aggregator of choice.  With the demise of Vizify, writer havens now include: Clippings.me, Pressfolios, Contently and  Journo Portfolio.  If you’re looking for a splash page only, About.Me makes it easy.

If you want to up the ante and create a website in WordPress, Wix or Squarespace, you might choose to hire a designer, contract an online service to create pages, use a third-party software tool or build it from scratch yourself.  Having done this with Adobe’s Dreamweaver I personally feel, like making your own pasta, that life is too short. Especially when you have other options such asWordPress.com and the self-hosting WordPress.org, which are still amongst the most common platforms for journos.

Choosing a domain

Make sure you pony up and invest in your own domain name. In a nutshell: check the domain name availability at one of the hundreds of thousands of domain name searching sites here, here and here. Choose your domain name with care – the shorter and more memorable the better and ensure you use .com where possible or .net or .org if need by BUT AVOID.biz, .us or. info as they are often used by malicious websites and spammers.

When hosting, self-hosting wins as the others make money by placing ads (and even low cost hosting can mean more downtime and less customer service).

Spell out what you do

It’s so important to be specific about what it is you do and you’re selling on your website. So often we receive website URLs from people who have gone to the trouble of getting a domain name and putting a lovely site together who are then vague about what they do. Personally I would rather read, ‘I am a copywriter and digital strategist and author’ than ‘I have always had a love of words and it is my daily passion’. Sorry, but that tells us precisely nothing about what you do for a crust or your experience. It’s so important to spell it out.

Also, because prospective clients are often looking at your site as verification that you can deliver, testimonials scattered throughout your site are gold.  The easiest way to collect them is to thank people when they write and thank you for your good work and ask if you can quote them.  LinkedIn users will know that you can mailshot up to 200 of your contacts asking for a recommendation. But with my PR hat on I can say that this scattergun approach isn’t going to make anyone feel special or particularly receptive to the idea so go for quality over quantity.

If you’d like to add to this snapshot or have a question about online portfolios we’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile keep an eye out for my Ask Us Wednesday post answering one members concern about spruiking their articles online.