Web Designer Portfolios

Web designer portfolios are often the most neglected part of a website. This is due to the fact that the bulk of any designer's time is usually spent on their clients, producing great work and billable hours. However, web designer portfolios are the billboards by which travelers on the Internet superhighway find and pay for the services of freelancers around the world, so those billboards should be a primary focus during any free time in between clients.

What goes into a good portfolio? Your best work, certainly, but keep in mind that if you have a variety of clients, your best work probably varies quite a bit. Showing a variety of sites is a good way to attract more than just one kind of client. The following are the type of sites a web designer might put in a well-rounded portfolio:

• E-commerce Site – A great deal of the web is about money, and providing evidence that you know how to develop a website for a company that sells a product is a good way to get money-savvy clients.
• Blogging or Social Media Site – While it's quickly becoming a meaningless buzzword, examples of social media include blogs, twitter, and other RSS-enabled sites. Being able to integrate blog engines, such as Wordpress or other content management systems, into a good site design is an immensely marketable skill.
• Personal Site – Whether it's cats or breakfast foods, many people just want to use the web to showcase their own passion. A good designer will listen to the needs of each client as an individual and showing evidence of how well you meet those needs in creatively effective ways is a very good feature of any portfolio.
• Newsletter – The web is a great way for any organization, commercial to non-profit, to share news and events through online magazine-style sites. These are often quite challenging in terms of layout, requiring a great deal of knowledge in terms of fonts, image manipulation, and branding to create an easy-to-read and inviting website.

In each of the sites showcased in web designer portfolios, notes should be made about any special web design skills used in the creation and maintenance of each site. Did you have to practice any significant MySQL manipulation in order to develop the e-commerce site? Mention it! Did you use CSS instead of tables in order to create your clients cupcake blog? Make sure it's prominently mentioned on your site. The purpose of a portfolio is to showcase all of your work, not simply in pictures but also in behind-the-scenes elements that are just as important.

Keep in mind that web designer portfolios are part of the web designer's main site, and should be consistent with the personal branding of that site. Usually this means putting a screenshot of the showcased site within some sort of frame, surrounded by explanations of the site's purpose and a link to the "live" site. If the site is no longer live, make sure that you make a note of that, even if you had nothing to do with the site being taken down. That work is still a good example of your capabilities as a web designer.

There are many examples on the web of excellent web designer portfolios. In each, the designers make sure that their own sense of style permeates not only the graphics and presentation but also the methods of navigation (Flash, CSS, etc). In the dynamic world of web design, the pacing of a website and the transitions between the pages are as important to the user experience as the actual content is.

Here are some stellar examples of great web designer portfolios to draw inspiration from:

• Sofa: Software, interactive design, and other graphics, including icon design.
• Creative Design Studio: A very innovative and dynamic site with a unique navigation design.
• Ayush Saran: A designer based in London, UK, who features his skills in xHTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript heavily on his site.

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