How To Create A Web Portfolio

Matt Arnold

July 7, 2008

I just lost a temp assignment paying a very good rate to design websites, because I couldn't think of any URLs to send them to. An hour ago everyone was excited and it looked like I had it in the bag. The agent just called to ask for samples, and I choked in obvious shame and embarrassment about how I have no online professional experience to show.

My work for Valenite is locked up behind passwords. I don't want employers going to my personal site, because it's the kind of content that should not have any bearing on the workplace. There's still Kirk In The Hills, but I did that years ago. Penguicon 6.0 is still online from last year, but was not paying work, and was basically just a masthead and some color choices. Plus there's some weird "Local pop get this player" glitch going on in the upper-left corner recently that I don't understand.

A portfolio of websites, by nature, would be looked at without me present to explain, by a stranger who knows nothing of me or the context of the work. Not all design is equivalent for these purposes; how do I know which site is relevant to send them to, before I know which kinds of design challenges they want to consider me for? When I send someone to look at a site, how do I know which part of the work are they going to judge? How do they know what I contributed to the site? For my personal site, I took somebody's Wordpress template and personalized it. Kirk In The Hills hired a hosting company that provided content management coding services, and just asked me to decide how it looked. Penguicon 6.0 is the standard blog outline. All my work for Valenite was adding content to an existing site that was already designed.

What would a portfolio of web sites be like? The concept seems counter-intuitive. A web site is its own entity with its own purpose outside a portfolio. It lives and breathes and changes for its purpose, out of the designer's control. A site that only shows off "design", devoid of content or audience, would show off... what? What is design without content to design around and a specific audience to design for? An empty frame to hang on the wall, meant for strangers. Certainly not something that I know how to do, or even begin.

When I design, I please a particular audience, because I know something about them. That audience is the group of people who will have to look at the thing and use it. Unfortunately, in an employment context, this is not the same group who are paying for it. With a portfolio, I would have to design for people who are only looking at it because they are paid to look at it. Not because they want to find out about the topic of the website. I don't know how to help them find information they don't actually want. Can you tell how frustrated I feel about this?

I have many sites in the works, on paper prototypes. Me and

le_bebna_kamni

have been on a paper prototyping binge of late. A Massively Multi-Author Webcomic. A Lojban combat quest game. A concept I call "FOMS", for user input on convention scheduling. I think what I'll do is start a YouTube video series showing the paper prototypes and how these web apps would function if anyone coded them. I suppose that in order to get professional web work, I'll have to have a set of web sites that exist completely within my control, for which I am solely responsible. For someone who likes to collaborate, that's frustrating.

Comments

users on Jul. 7, 2008 7:33 PM

I don't know, I use the Penguicon 6.0 website, my own website, and a small-ish handful of others that I've done as pay work in my portfolio.

Realize that the pages you pick today only need to be your portfolio for a few jobs, then THOSE jobs can be your portfolio.

The alternative is to make a few layouts for your site and use those as a portfolio.

atdt1991 on Jul. 7, 2008 7:36 PM

Create a flash or video portfolio instead, that leads from item to item, with the bullet-points you design.

muteid10t on Jul. 8, 2008 12:14 AM

I would do a gallery of screen caps of the different site that you have worked on. Providing a small description of the work you did for each under the screen cap to detail the work done. It might also be a good idea to take the screen cap of the work done at the time of completion because as you noted websites do not always stay the same and occasionally get redesigned over time.

thatguychuck on Jul. 8, 2008 5:42 AM

Seconded. That's the idea of what I came in here to say.

amanda_lodden on Jul. 8, 2008 12:16 AM

Where you go wrong in the whole thing is in this line:

I don't know how to help them find information they don't actually want.

You claim repeatedly in your posts about work that you like to solve problems, but you always miss the idea that the person doing the hiring is also looking to solve a problem. Their perspective on the problem might be different, but a key fact you often overlook is that no one pays for something that they don't think will be useful to them. Instead of being frustrated at not being able to help them find information they don't want, put yourself into their shoes for a minute and try to figure out what information they DO want.

Let me offer you a different perspective, one from the point of view of someone who would have a reason to go and hire a web designer (and indeed, recently did hire a designer to re-do our PHP-based request system). Were I to hire someone for a new project and wasn't already familiar with their work (i.e., not you), I'd also ask for a portfolio. In doing so, I'd not be interested so much in what the actual content is, but in the following:

* Most importantly, a portfolio indicates that you can actually finish a project. There is zero usefulness for me to hire someone who will quit midway through. If the payment is agreed as a "per project" deal, then I'm still out the time it took for the designer to get partway. That includes my time for designing the specs, the time of whatever client base I plan to use the project for, and the time of the employees who are in a holding pattern. Maybe I've only put off making other marketing items to co-ordinate, maybe I've only delayed the launch of a service-- but those are still "costs" to me. If it's a much larger project and we've negotiated a per-hour rate paid on a scheduled basis, then I'm out all of the above PLUS whatever I've already paid you. Being able to see other projects that you've finished is the first step in determining whether you're going to be an asset or a liability.

* Your portfolio will also tell me whether you're a one-trick pony or not. If you show me four sites designed for four clients and they all look the same to me, that tells me that I'm going to get something that looks very similar. That's not *always* a liability, if your one-size-fits-all solution also fits me, but if I want something different, I want enough variety in your portfolio to show me that you're flexible, and can work with your clients to give them what they need rather than what you shove at them. In this sense, pointing them towards the Kirk In The Hills site and the Penguicon site is not a bad idea, because they are dissimilar and indicate that you can work with my needs. Your personal site is also different from both of those, and could be used as another example, though I would recommend removing most of the content from it just for your own privacy-- which brings up my next point, which is that you should ALWAYS keep your portfolio hosted on a server that's under your control, and remove private information from it. However, being able to see how the text flows is still helpful, so in the portfolio version you can easily remove the client's text in favor of text describing why you designed it the way you did, or which portions you designed and which you designed around (i.e., were specified by the client). This will have the added benefit of reinforcing the idea that you can work WITH your client and suit their needs, because something along the lines of "I put this bit here because the client asked for something that would make it easier for them to do X" is ridiculously informative.

For an example of a portfolio that makes me drool, look at http://www.chrisd.com/projects_web.html . The only reason I did not hire him for ... roughly every project ever, frankly... is that he did not return any of my emails. I'm not suggesting that you should do exactly as he does, but he does a good job of showing his work while still explaining how it came to be the way it is, and hopefully it will give you a spark of inspiration.

matt-arnold on Jul. 8, 2008 12:43 AM

Thanks for the link. I'll get a new domain and do something like that.

You claim repeatedly in your posts about work that you like to solve problems

Not exactly. I like to solve problems that I care about, or for people who I care about.

I want to find some line of work in which I can sell things on the internet, or get money directly from the users of a web app. A business-to-business service, such as design, is a way to make a living, but I hope I won't be doing it indefinitely. It's meeting needs that I don't want to meet.

temujin9 on Jul. 9, 2008 4:59 AM

Well, that covers the ground better than I would have. Seconded: a portfolio demonstrates your work ethic, not your designs, to anybody worth working for.

protoblues on Jul. 8, 2008 12:52 AM

Wish I could be of some assistance with this. At the very least, I found something that I thought you might like. Hope it cheers you up a bit.

http://www.guardiansun.com/webcomic/162.shtml

Best of luck with everything.

toni-rey on Jul. 15, 2008 1:32 AM

Not having read any of the other replies, I may be repeating advice on web pages. It is perfectly acceptable to create pages that are your vision of current websites, as long as you denote them as such. This helps a prospective employer realize your strengths in the choices you made when taking a so-so page and creating a useful exciting page. You can even add your own text to these remade pages that explains simply why you've made the choices you have implemented on the remade site. You don't have to create a lot of pages for each site, just a few that show you know how to create pages that work and carry continuity. Put these sites into your digital portfolio and find some free space to store them. If anyone knows where to find free space, you're the one! So go find some web sites you hate and recreate them! Good luck. (Oh and for the record, this is the same advice my digital portfolio instructor gave to our class this past semester.)

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