Displaying your website design work in a well laid out portfolio will increase sales. The way you’re presenting the work you have already done to potential new clients will clinch a sale or they will move on to another WordPress website design company. Get your portfolio right from the beginning and you will boost sales overnight.
Common Portfolio Mistakes
Most design companies make a complete mess of their design portfolio by not making the right choices in presenting their work. Taking just a screen shot of the homepage is just a complete waste of time. It looks boring and outdated. Wave bye bye to 2005 and start presenting your work like a professional! After all, you should be the expert in web page layouts so apply it to your own website.
We have browsed through a number of WordPress website design portfolios and found that SixtyMarketing stands out to us the most. You can tell the guys there spend a lot of effort and time in to each of their portfolio items, allowing them to showcase their work perfectly. From this, we’re going to use their web design portfolio as the bench mark for all WordPress website design companies and how they should present their work.
Big, Fresh, Clean
Do not over clutter your images and make the web page untidy. Make sure your main featured image is large and has plenty of space around it, eg, no other images, text etc. A lot of companies use grid formats to present their work but this makes everything look like one big mess. Your work does not jump off the page to the user. All your work just gets jumbled together.
You need to start thinking like a user. Let say he or she are a plumber. They will want to take a look at the work you have done for other plumbing companies. They need to be able to clearly view these sites in order for them to make a decision with proceeding with you or not.
Be Creative
Get out of 2005! As soon as you do this your web design business will start receiving more enquiries. Taking a screenshot of a page is a joke. Its old, its boring. Nobody is interested in looking at this! You are a design company, your designs are what get you work! Start being creative with it!
Lets go forward to 2014. The inserting a screenshot evolved slightly. Now these screen grabs of work are being placed on an illustrated Mac screen (iMac, MacBook, iPad, iPhone etc). Nearly every single WordPress website design business displayed their work in this way and most still do today. Again, boring today!
What the pros do with their website design portfolios is do things that nobody else is doing. For example, SixtyMarketing uses real photos of a relevant image to the clients industry and place design work on real Macs. Say they did a job for a landscape gardener. The image will be of a beautiful garden with a MacBook Pro on top of a wooden table. Looks bespoke, modern and most important of all, easy to spot for a potential client who is in the same industry.
Write About What You Did
Try to go into as much detail as possible with your portfolios. It gives the user an insight into the design build of your company. Not only that, you are adding quality, fresh, relevant content to your own site, which is the same as blogging! This is a lot quicker than coming up with new blog post ideas a couple times a week and then spending hours writing about it.
Start from the beginning. Include their design brief and as much relevant communication as possible. Include every step of the design process along with problems and solutions you came across. Add clients feedback through each step of the way, good or bad as this will give new customers an understanding how you deal with clients to best meet their needs.
Before you know it you will have 1500+ words of quality content that will be a great read for potential clients and boost your SEO. Win win!
Include Images of Old Website
If you have built a redesign for a client, showcase how their old site used to look. Its important you clearly indicate thats this is their OLD SITE as you do not want users to think you built something old and outdated!
It is important that users can see how you transformed a companies business online as this puts immediate trust into a potential client.
Categories Your Work
Place every portfolio item into an industry category. This allows potential clients who are in the same industry find similar sites you have build. This is a huge selling point for your website design portfolio.
Don’t just do the absolute minimum for your WordPress website design portfolio. Your work is the biggest selling point your company has. Use it to your full advantage.