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The making of a design portfolio

Thread title: The making of a design portfolio
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07-31-2006, 04:16 PM
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Digit is offline Digit
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  Old  The making of a design portfolio

First off I would like to say that all of these opinions not in quotes are my views on how things should be done. If you feel the need to state how something should otherwise be done please post below and state it, or shoot me a PM. This article is the respective Nerdpoint.com, and should only be reposted if it includes a link to nerdpoint.com Written by Dylan Andrews.

Table of Contents
  • Having a Plan
  • Getting Started
  • Designing Your Portfolio
  • Clients
  • Rates
  • Advertising

Having a Plan
It is always in your best interest to have a plan before going about making a portfolio. Having a plan is one of the first and foremost important things to making a portfolio. What you need to have is a general idea of what you are going to do with your portfolio, the design, clients, hosting, and some others that I will eventually get into later. Without an idea where will you go from there? Will you just lollygag around and make stuff up as you go? If so I don't suggest it, which is a very good way to have a disorganized and unprofessional portfolio. Try looking around at other portfolios to see what they are doing and how they have their site working and such.

Getting Started
Domain
For a portfolio a great thing to have is an easy to remember domain. Try using your name or something to that effect, if that doesn’t interest you try using easy words to remember. These are both things that make it easy for search engines to recognize your site. Something like Radical Designs would be a lot easier to find on a search engine than something like Unka Bubs Designz. Using common to find words that relate to your site is something you should always keep in mind.
www.GoDaddy.com
www.1and1.com
www.namecheap.com
Hosting
Hosting is always something that should certainly not be overlooked. Please notice that most portfolios don't take up an awful lot of space and the traffic isn’t quite so high as larger communities and things of that sort. So if you are on a tight budget with not much to spend starting your portfolio up it is best to go with a cheap hosting plan. A hosting plan like this is something good and cheap that will get you off of the ground and rolling along your way to the money tree.
www.liquidxhost.com
www.GoDaddy.com
www.1and1.com
www.brius.com
Designing Your Portfolio
Designing your portfolio is one of the key parts of getting good business. There are many things that can discourage a user from your site and take away precious cash you could be making. Take into consideration some of these things, screen resolution, user friendliness, color schemes, and the overall design of the page. A sure turn off for me when I go to any site is seeing a bad design, bad designs can completely ruin a site no matter how good the content may be. You need to make the site look good and function good for your target audience. Screen Resolution also plays a part in whether or not some people like the page. If you make your design over 790 pixels wide then someone with an 800 x 600 screen resolution will have to scroll sideways to view your content. This becomes very annoying and tiresome when you have to scroll to read content, and then scroll back to get to the navigation. User friendliness is a must; a site that is hard to read with small text can turn people down so it is always a good idea to have a solution for a common problem like that. Using some code you can make it to where users can adjust the text size to something that suits their fancy. Hideous colors are another thing of mine that I cannot stand; say for instance someone has a site with purples, yellows, oranges, and pinks all in neon colors. Most of those colors clash and won't make for a good appearance. Some of the most used colors are the primary colors. Keep that in mind when designing a portfolio.

Clients
There are many ways to get a client. But seeing as this article is on the making of a portfolio I will only get into some good ways of starting off. Ways that I have found useful are pretty commonly used and work rather well. Start off by asking friends family etc if they would like a web page designed. If so start working on it, doing this for free can also help you out whether you think so or not because it adds work to your online portfolio. After doing a few minor projects try heading to a local church or something and do a free website for them, sort of like a charity type website. This is just for more work in the portfolio, and if their nice they might actually give you some cash. Now that you have the basics underhand go on to a local company or store, and by this I don't mean the WalMart two blocks down the road. Try going to a small local law firm or a wine shop. Something small and one of a kind should do just right. Offer them your services and give them some contact information for you and the address to your online portfolio. Guess what, you actually have some websites you can show that are online now in your portfolio. One of the most commonly used ones today though is online marketing. Going to forums and offering your services can be a good and productive way to get clients. There are good and bad forums to do this at so think of that when you’re out browsing the Internet for a forum to sell some stuff on. I'll post some sites below I would recommend going to, to sell something. Keep doing this until you have some clients and there you go, your finally making some money.
www.talkfreelance.com
www.webhostingtalk.com

Rates
Well, I can't really tell you to do anything but I can suggest some things. The industry of designing can be pretty expensive to those looking for designs. All I can say is please do not underprice yourself. Granted you can make easy money doing it that way you are bringing down the price of the market. Sure if your a teenager like myself you'll want to charge $15.00 to like $50.00 but that's not going tog et you anywhere in the long run. Look at it like this; say you charge $50.00 for a template that took you 5 hours to make. That's 10 dollars an hour; you can make more than that working at your local grocery store. Being a designer should be a higher paying job and your skills and creativity are worth so much more. Try charging $75.00+ for layouts, that's just for designs, coding not included. Good designers can charge up to $100.00 per hour of service. Sure that's pricey to some but do you really think the big multi-million/billion dollar companies they do this for are going to care too much? Do not overcharge yourself either, doing this can result in small amounts of clients if any. Change your prices according to whom you are serving. If your doing the local bakery down the road you should charge more than if your doing a personal blog layout for someone else.

Advertising
There are many ways you can advertise your portfolio. The main thing I would do is to join forums, and build a name for yourself there. If people like your work, they will start asking you to do different design jobs for them. You can also post your portfolio if someone at a forum is wanted a job. You could also make some premade designs, and sell those off. That gets people familiar with your work, while making a little side cash. I would also carry around business cards, so incase you ever run into somebody who's looking for a website, you can pull out your card.


I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my article and I hope that you have learned something from it and enjoyed the read.

Dylan Andrews.
nerdpoint.com

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08-01-2006, 08:21 AM
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itaca is offline itaca
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  Old

Thanks for sharing even though I didn't get much out of it. But some newcomers might.

08-31-2006, 02:26 AM
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SereneIT is offline SereneIT
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Thanks Dylan,

found this to be very useful.

08-31-2006, 10:39 PM
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Julian is offline Julian
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  Old

Really good stuff, you have covered a lot of areas with this, well done!

09-06-2006, 11:39 PM
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Aaron Faulkner is offline Aaron Faulkner
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  Old

Glad that you took the time to make this review; it should be helpful to some people

09-08-2006, 05:53 PM
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metamorphium is offline metamorphium
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great tips, helped me out a lot

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