Whether you’re a writer, an artist, another creative professional, or even a coder, a professional portfolio is a key to success. For freelancers, having a portfolio of your work ready to send to potential clients is essential. And even if you have a full-time job, having a portfolio ready will be a great help next time you’re job hunting.
Designing and building an online portfolio can sound complicated if you’re not technically minded. Fortunately, there are websites which allow you to create a portfolio easily and with no technical knowledge required. These are our recommendations for sites to build a clean, professional-looking portfolio.
1. Clippings.me
Clippings.me is great for hosting articles and posts that you’ve written. It’s good for writers, journalists, bloggers, and others who have a text-heavy portfolio.
The display options are fairly minimal. That means there isn’t a massive amount of customization possible. But the theme used is smart and modern. And you can change the header image and the icon to personalize your portfolio page.
The portfolio site is easy to use with the drag and drop builder. You don’t need any coding or technical knowledge whatsoever. You can simply copy and paste a link to your work and the site will automatically pull the title, display image, and the excerpt from your article for you.
Alternatively, you can manually add entries to the portfolio. And if you have written or other work in a PDF format, you can upload the PDF to your portfolio and have it available for download.
You can also give yourself a title, add a description, and link to your personal website. And you can add links to your social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
The free version of the site lets you add up to 16 clippings, or you can pay $10 per month to host unlimited clippings. The free version does have the clippings.me banner at the top of the page but it’s unobtrusive.
Example portfolios on Clippings.me:
2. About.me
About.me is very flexible and can be used by artists, consultants, and other professionals as well as writers. No coding skills are required and you can use the site to generate a simple, smart homepage which has both a desktop and a mobile version.
You can add an image of yourself but you should choose a high resolution image as it is displayed in large format on the desktop version. Supplement it with a title and description of your work. You can also add links to your email address and to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Beneath your image on the home page is a “spotlight button”. You can choose what you most want to link to from here, such as your blog, your YouTube channel, or your podcast.
The free version of the site lets you set up a basic profile. But to set up a full portfolio using the site, you’ll need to pay for the Pro version. That costs $7 per month. This will also give you access to other features like using a domain to access your profile and extra pages like testimonials and video.
Example portfolios on About.me:
3. Muckrack.com
Muckrack.com is a handy resource for journalists and other writers. You can’t customize the way that your profile appears much. However, you can customize the content on it.
The most useful feature is the automatic updating. This works by pulling your articles from around the web and adding them to your profile. You don’t need to do anything to keep your profile up to date. You can also add clippings manually if you have some articles which aren’t automatically located.
MuckRack is also well integrated with Twitter. You can set your Twitter account and your latest tweets will be displayed right in your profile.
A handy extra for journalists is the information about pitching. As the site is used by PR professionals, you can give information on how you like to be pitched. You can specify which topics you do and don’t cover to make the pitches you receive more relevant to you.
The site is free for journalists to use, but you do need to be verified. To get verified you need to have a byline in a well-known website or newspaper.
Example portfolios on MuckRack.com:
4. Tumblr.com
For visual artists and musicians, Tumblr can make a surprisingly great portfolio site. As it’s designed for sharing content of all kinds you can upload images, video clips, audio clips, and links to be displayed on your blog. It’s free to use and posting is very easy.
However, you will need to install a custom theme to make your blog look more like a portfolio. This requires a little bit of technical knowledge, as you’ll need to download a theme from a site and upload it to the Tumblr customization page. This will be easier if you already know HTML and CSS.
If you like web design, you can create your own theme from scratch. This gives you absolute flexibility over the way your posts are displayed. And Tumblr supports jQuery and JavaScript so you can customize the sorting and display options. You can also easily link your domain to your Tumblr site.
If that sounds a bit too technical, though, don’t worry. There are elegant and fun ready-made themes that you can use for free. We already have recommendations for the best free Tumblr themes for creating a portfolio.
Example portfolio themes on Tumblr:
5. WordPress.com
There are a couple of ways to use WordPress as a portfolio. Firstly, you can upload your clippings as blog posts, then display the blog in a portfolio form. Or secondly, if you already have a blog, you can add a separate portfolio page.
The Portfolio Projects option can be enabled in your WordPress settings. It allows you to choose how many projects to display per page and to add new projects such as text, images, or links. If you’re already familiar with writing blog posts in WordPress then adding a portfolio project is a very similar process.
If you add a portfolio projects site to your current blog, your portfolio will appear at yoursite.wordpress.com/portfolio.
Alternatively, if you are starting out and using the blog itself as your portfolio, then check our list of free responsive WordPress themes to use as a portfolio.
Example portfolio themes on WordPress:
Quickly and Easily Create a Professional Portfolio
With these sites you can create a professional online portfolio, even if you don’t have a lot of technical knowledge. Clippings.me, About.me, and MuckRack.com require zero coding skills to set up and use. Or if you know some web development, you can use Tumblr or WordPress to present your portfolio in a more customized way.
Alternatively, if you’re creative and want to make your portfolio really stand out, we also have tips on creative ways to show off your work online.
Read the full article: 5 Super Simple Sites to Create Your Online Portfolio
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