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You want to show your creatives with the other people, and you know a portfolio website provides the most effective vehicle to do so.
You’re not sure you have the time or the wherewithal to build one from scratch and you don’t know which website building tool out there would be a good choice, and which ones would not.
You would like to have a website up and running ASAP, but not at the expense of its overall performance. In any event, you want to present your offerings in the best possible light to earn the consideration and trust of potential clients or customers.
There are several important portfolio-building features you need to be aware of to ensure your ultimate success. We’ll use the Portfoliobox portfolio-builder solutions to demonstrate how you can use and best take advantage of these features.
5 Invaluable Time-saving and Quality-boosting Portfolio-building Features
Don’t allow your portfolio be a detriment to your creative business’s success. A portfolio builder with the following features will be one you can put your trust in to get your work in front of an appreciative audience super-fast.
Let’s start with:
- Template mix-and-matching
You could select a theme-based building tool if you are eager to get your portfolio site online quickly. If it does the job for you that’s well and good, but more likely than not you won’t get the results you planned on. The reason: whole theme and page templates compel you to adhere to a layout or style that could significantly differ from what you have in mind.
You can customize, but even if you can successfully do so you’re likely to have lost any chance of getting online quickly.
Since you want your website to accurately reflect your creative personality, using mix and match page-building templates is the best and easiest way to make that happen.
You don’t need to:
- Allow someone else to decide your site’s look and feel
- Spend a lot of time trying to customize a theme to achieve your intended look and feel
- Design the site from scratch
With Portfoliobox, for example, you will still start with a blank slate, but it’s a quick and simple process to build your site’s pages one section at a time.
It’s not that difficult to find section templates that align good with what you expect your pages to look like, whatever the nature and purpose of the content. You’ll also discover that it’s much more satisfying to fill in your own details as opposed to customizing to try to make things fit.
- All-in-one pricing, affordable and with transparent monthly plans
Another route to consider if you want to quickly create an excellent portfolio website and do so inexpensively is to look for a “free” website builder or one that has “affordable plans”.
The problem here is akin to selecting a theme-based website builder. Building a site may be quick and easy, but one or more of the features you sorely need is lacking.
While you can always choose an “upgrade” to resolve the problem, but that still may but guarantee that you won’t run into more surprises down the road.
Let’s use Portfoliobox as an example of what you should look for.
Portfoliobox offers Light, Pro, and Pro Plus pricing plans (Pro is free of cost for students), plus if you need to use Portfoliobox on a monthly basis you can select monthly pricing.
As the characteristics of each Portfoliobox plan are broken out, you can see exactly what’s included:
- A custom domain name (for Pro plans)
- SSL certification
- Web hosting and unlimited bandwidth
- Mobile responsive website editor
- eCommerce functionality is included
- Image protection and storage
- Search engine optimization tools
- Fast and reliable customer support
You’ll find everything you need in the available monthly price as well.
- 4 strategic creative business features
Assuming the website builder you select gives you the ability to design an impressive portfolio creation, what does it do to help you streamline your business dealings?
Having an impressive portfolio is fine but if you’re selling products or services how you conduct your business dealings should be impressive as well.
For example:
Right-click disabling – You want to protect your online work from theft and disabling Portfoliobox’s right-clicking to save feature to accomplish that is as easy as it gets.
Private client galleries – When you make a sale you need a secure and fast way for sending the work to the purchaser. You can ensure speed and security by using online tools to create a private gallery for the client.
That approach could require setting up a second platform, but you can avoid wasting your time doing so by creating your private galleries from Portfoliobox.
In doing so, you can manage your portfolio and your client communication and collaboration from the same platform.
Image watermarking – Watermarking your images not only protects them from theft but ensures your clients will have approved of and paid for the work you’ve done before they can put it to use.
Adding an image watermark is easy and you can apply it to any image gallery.
Third-party integration – This time-saving tool lets you pull files of images you’ve edited on another platform (e.g., YouTube, Lightroom, or Vimeo) directly into your website.
- Integrating eCommerce into your portfolio website
The purpose of integrating eCommerce into your portfolio website is to avoid wasting your time looking for, building, and managing two platforms for two purposes.
The preferred approach in determining how to build a portfolio website would be to look for a website-building solution that has eCommerce features built into it. That way, you can avoid potential configuration problems since the necessary settings will already be present in your store.
As you can see in the Portfoliobox example below, eCommerce functionality is built into the platform.
Add-ons are not necessary. Adding a Store is simply a matter of adding another page to your portfolio site.
- Timely and reliable customer service
Some great website builders are providing users with excellent documentation and tutorials, others with a single FAQ page (if that much). The problem is, if you are experiencing website problems you need troubleshooting help right away.
The time it can take to fix a website problem could cost you a potential client or customer; a pretty steep price to pay.
Simply put, you want a platform that can give you the service and support you need, when you need it; and that is yet another feature Portfoliobox has integrated into its platform.
When you subscribe to one of the Pro plans you will have 24/7 access to the customer support chat feature.
The fast, affordable, and intuitive way to make a high-performance portfolio website
While there are plenty of website builders on the market that feature portfolio-building tools, Portfoliobox was specifically designed with creatives in mind.
Your portfolio will not only be your website’s main attraction, as opposed to a secondary one, but it will have the features and functionality you’ll want to streamline your business workflow.
Portfoliobox is flat-out one of the best website builders for creative talents like you. It is easy to work with, it’s affordable, it will allow you to get your perfect portfolio website up and running quickly, and it will provide a safe and secure haven for your work.
