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I've been happily employed for awhile now, so I've not kept up on various trends and changes in the online portfolio field. I would like to remedy this knowledge gap.

I can do a search for "best online portfolio sites" but a search like that is a little tainted by people who want you to buy their solution.

If you've made a portfolio site for yourself or a client, what are you using?

It seems to me that you can use a service like Behance (but are there other services that are equal or better in terms of features, ease of use, ads, etc.?), adapt a theme to a blog/CMS WordPress or Tumblr, or build something from scratch.

If it's necessary to narrow the scope of the question a bit, I'd say that the ideal portfolio site looks modern but not trendy, has a great user experience, and is easy to update. Preferably, it can be self-hosted, unless people have found that going on a dedicated social network is better.

It'd be interesting to hear answers from graphic designers who don't code a lot as well as web designers who do it for a living.

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  • I find it weird that you mention ads in a question about portfolio website.
    – Joonas
    Feb 11, 2013 at 6:42
  • @Joonas As in, Behance has ads; maybe another service does not. Or has less, or lets you get rid of them.
    – Brendan
    Feb 11, 2013 at 13:38
  • Right. For some reason I thought you mentioned it because placing ads is a feature you are after.
    – Joonas
    Feb 11, 2013 at 13:56

4 Answers 4

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I saw many websites that were prepared for portfolios only and most of them were too dynamic for me to pay attention to any of the drawings/photos/graphics.

If you would like to keep the programming minimal you may want to prepare a pdf file; I have a pdf portfolio and send it to clients who requests graphics. You can easily put it in your website too.

Another option may be to use websites like deviantART but personally I think it is not very professional.

It is worth noting that I am not a professional designer (I don't have any degree or certificate) and I design graphics as a hobby and these are my personal opinions.

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I've found to truly be designed and have control one must create something unique and avoid prepackages services or scripts.

I don't necessarily think using some CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, et. al.) is a bad thing. But there's simply too much given up to those packages. And if one does not rework most of the front-end at least, everything still looks like a skinned Wordpress site.

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Suggestion 1: Create a PDF file with your work and out it somewhere online.

Suggestion 2: Find a simple wordpress, textpattern or drupal theme, install it on your server and enjoy! (for this option you will need basic coding skills or a html/css coder(maybe a friend?).

Suggestion 3: Create a facebook page and then use this facebook plugin to embed it into a simple html page that lives on our server. example: http://erfiga.com/social-stream/

*note:

You can customize the size of the embeded plugin, so you can make it fullscreen. What I like about this option is that you can simply post your stuff on a facebook page, where supposedly your already have some kind of audience, then the website, your portfolio "updates itself".

Suggestion 4: Try these ready made solutions(simmilar to behace):

  1. https://www.see.me
  2. http://www.visualart.me

Suggestion 5: Buy a template - and then install it on your website - from a platform that allows you to create a website with no coding skills at all. Examples:

  1. http://www.wix.com/
  2. http://www.simplecms.com/
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A very popular site these days to display your work is Dribbble

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  • Do you use it? What do you think about it?
    – Brendan
    Feb 12, 2013 at 2:10
  • I don't use it myself. I follow a lot of blogs and it seems to be a recurring theme as the new 'in' place for designers to show their work.
    – John
    Feb 12, 2013 at 16:11

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