Pretty much every aspiring web designer starts the career journey with creating their own portfolio website. A personal portfolio and blogging have been the most important marketing tools for designers for a very long time. But are they still that fruitful, what with the skyrocketing rise of social platforms?
The information spreads at unbelievable speeds via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So do you still really need a personal website to offer your web designing skills to the world and get clients? Let’s find out!
What's a better marketing tool?
These days you do not necessarily need a website to spread the word and market your design services. Many designers don’t even bother with creating a website for themselves anymore. They reach out to people via social media, do guest posts on design-related blogs, create newsletters and even podcasts. All these things do spread the word much faster than a website without a proper marketing campaign in place.
On the other hand - a page on Facebook does not provide any credibility to you as a web designer, while a portfolio website gives you plenty of it. That is, of course, if it is well designed and functional, and the portfolio itself is updated regularly.
So to answer the above question - social media are a better marketing tool. At least a faster one. But a proper website is a better way to show off your skills and give you credibility as a professional web designer.
Blogging of simply showing pictures?
Blogging used to be pretty straightforward. You created a blog, wrote a short post or two and that was it. It is not that simple anymore. The social media have affected this landscape as well.
So should you be blogging or is it more effective to simply share some pictures of your works on platforms like Behance, Dribbble etc?
I don’t see why not do both and benefit from all these marketing opportunities. Yes, it most definitely will be more time and effort consuming. But I do believe it is worth all the effort. Plus, you do not need to use all the social media, choose one or two that will better suit your works and concentrate your attention on them.
Of course, if you are bad with words and do not know how to properly promote the blog, blogging will simply be a huge loss of resources for you. The point of blogging is to attract the new audience and get the old one involved too.
If you are good with words, however, you can yet again benefit from both blogging and social media. How? Share your blog posts on those social websites, share a picture or two to invite the possible customers to see more on your blog. This is an awesome way to bring more traffic and get new clients!
Starting a conversation
Sharing your ideas and starting a conversation with your audience and peers is of vital importance for creatives. This way you can better understand the current state of the industry, its needs, and the most recent trends.
It is also a good way to help your ideas reach the wider audience, the people you personally would not be able to reach. Your peers share your ideas with their friends, those friends share it with their other friends and so on. Basically, I just described what viral content is. Every marketer will assure you viral content is golden when it comes to establishing a brand.
Doing this with only your website is pretty much impossible. Then again, what prevents you from starting the conversation via social networks and directing the audience to your portfolio at the same time? I do believe this is the smartest way to go about it.
Final thoughts
It might seem like a personal portfolio website is pointless today. There is a lot of people who will tell you this. You can, in fact, reach out to people and get web design clients via social media alone. But doing both is way smarter. No Instagram account or Facebook page can provide you with such credibility and trustworthiness as a real, properly done website can.
So yes, I strongly believe the time to ditch the personal portfolio has not come as of yet. Most probably it will. But who knows when? For now, to outrun the competition you have got to be smarter and use all the available marketing tools, including a personal website, social networks, word of mouth, and whatever else you think might work, to get you more of those paying customers.
Granted, creating an actual website takes much more time and a lot of other resources, like money for hosting and domain name, than simply registering a social website profile. But there are professional website templates invented exactly for this very purpose, to make your life easier and website creation cheaper and faster! Get a beautiful template, customize the hell out of it and voila! You’ve got a perfect portfolio website without loosing too much effort and money on it.
Don't forget to take a look at our web personal WordPress themes.