There’s a few reasons why I think it’s important to have your own site with your work on, first of f having your own site will give you a professional look for potential clients, it sends out signals that this is a serious business that you’re committed too.

If you’re using a social platform like Instagram or Behance as your portfolio you’re sharing that site with thousand of other artists, designers and other people in your line of work, that’s a lot of competition you got to share the visitor’s attention with. If you instead have your own site with only your work it’s all about you, and if you send a potential client or customer to your portfolio it’s only your work they will see.

If you have your own portfolio site you decide how it should look and you have a lot more say in the design of your site, if you’re instead using a social platform for your portfolio you don’t have the same control over it. The layout could change in a update or the platform could even disappear or be shut down (unlikely yes, but it happens).

Take control how your work is shown to the world.

Also check out our other portfolio content, A complete guide to creating an Online Portfolio (Artist, Designers & Illustrators)

Adobe Portfolio is Adobe’s portfolio site service that’s integrated with Behance (their social platform for creatives). You upload your work on Behance and then the projects you upload will appear on your portfolio site.

You can then choose from different themes to get you started with your layout or you build your own portfolio from scratch. Editing a existing theme or making your own design is very simple, no coding is required.

The themes and designs available are very simple and stylish, I’d suggest you head over to the Adobe Portfolio homepage and see if there’s a theme or design that you like, because how they look is roughly how your artist portfolio will look like too. You’ll also find plenty of examples how other artists are using Adobe Portfolio.

Squarespace is one of the bigger services when it comes to artist portfolios, and it’s the favourite platform for many artist and designers to have an online portfolio on. Where many similar services provide a easy way to build any kind of website, Squarespace has specialised themself into especially supporting different creative professions and their website needs.

I’d suggest Squarespace over Adobe Portfolio just because there’s so many design options and it’s a really versatile platform that you can create any kind of website with without making it complicated. Adobe Portfolio can still be a great option if you’re happy with a simpler design, or if you already have active Creative cloud subcrition or already heavy invested in the Behance community.

(above is an affiliate link)

Squarespace let’s you build your portfolio with their site builder tool which is really simple to use (even for beginners), and you can of course create any kind of website with their tools (not only a portfolio), they even support having online shops for example.

They provide plenty of templates and themes you can use for creating your portfolio, I would suggest you pick one of their templates then just edit it and make the changes you want to make, it’s a easy way to get your portfolio online and most of their templates are really clean and beautiful, you can browse their whole section of templates over here.

Plugins is another way to make your WordPress site to work the way you want too, there’s thousands of different plugins to choose from and I won’t get into detail about plugins in this guide just because this is only a breif guide to get you started with a online portfolio. But what I will do is list some of my own favourite plugins that I use on my own WordPress portfolio.

• Akismet Anti-Spam – Simple plugin to help reduce comment spam on your site
• All In One WP Security –  Free plugin that will help you make your site more secure against hackers and unwanted login attempts, a must have in my book.
• Instagram Feed – Display your Instagram feed on your portfolio, plenty of design options in the free version.
• Smush – Plugin to reduce image file sizes
• All In One SEO Pack – Great plugin to help you with your SEO, basically help google and other search engines to read and find your site.

A good rule of thumb is to never download plugins that haven’t been updated for a very long time.

The first step in building a portfolio on Tumblr is finding a good theme to use, you can check out the themes that available on Tumblr over here (there’s both free and paid themes). Here’s a few great free portfolio themes to check out to get you started Syndex, Berlin, Ten Toes, Minimalism

Syndex

Berlin

Ten Toes

Minimalism