Creating Portfolio website for your Business
Customer have become internet savy, they google out before using a service or purchasing any product. They like to see your portfolio and hear what other are saying about you ( review and feedback ). This helps them to make better decision.
Like for example a group of friends would like search for restaurants nearby them and choose the one with better portfolio, similarly a person looking for a garage to repair his car/bike, or opting for accounting service, or before purchasing costly dress from a shop, or using marketing service and many other will make a research before opting you.
Therefore every business needs an online presence these days, and creating a portfolio website is the best and quickest way to take your business online and reach new customers. In a matter of viewing your website they know details about your business, services you provide, goods you sell, your prices, your clients, your contact details, feedback, reviews and can even drive to your office by using google map.
So, if your business doesn’t have online presence, you are loosing a portion of your customer who can bring more revenue than you spent on creating a well designed portfolio website. The good part about portfolio website is they are cost effective and requires little to no maintenance.
Planning for a Portfolio Website
Portfolio website should exactly represent your offline business to online customers.
Landing page:
Landing page or Home page is where the customer comes when they reach to your website. So landing page should be something which should show small details of everything you do. Like for example if you’re a restaurant owner, it should show 3-5 images of your restaurant, different cousines you serve (Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc), your specialty, review of recent customers, some other details and contact details. This gives a full summarized view about your restaurant. Customer can navigate to other details pages from here.
In short landing page should show summarized view about your business and give first positive impression to your customer.
Products / Service page:
Product / services page should show all products/services you deal with. Having good images along with description, and price if possible will be enough information for customers.
About Us page:
Some customers want to know more about your business. Management details, Business mission, values, beliefs are some good topics which you can describe here.
Contact page:
Contact page should contain all your contact details like Address of all your branches, phone, email, opening hours and closing hours. Google Map with exact location marked can also be added.
A contact form should also be added so that customers can quicky contact by filling out the form.
Other pages:
– Disclaimer, Terms & Conditions: This pages are optional. If the website contains some sensitive data then this pages can be included.
– Gallery: A gallery page containing photos can be added. This makes the website looks attractive.
Now that you have planned for all pages in your website, you must be thinking of how to create it ?
What should you use for Portfolio Website ?
You must purchase
- Domain Name
- Web Hosting (shared hosting).
Read complete details on choosing a hosting.
Frankly there are N number of options available for creating such a website.
Using a Web Development platform or website builder:
Many hosting providers provide a easy drag and drop web development platform with 100’s of themes. You simply need to choose a good looking theme, change the text, color and upload the relevant images. You can even opt for extra features (which comes with Extra Price) like Fully-Responsive (fits good in screen of all sizes – mobile, table, desktop; which is much needed), image gallery, google map, newsletter subscription add on, google analytic, pricing tables etc.
Looks good ? But wait, although this is easy to use, in long term the cost is more than other options.
Also you don’t have full customization authority with these kind of platforms, that is you cannot change a add on to work unique for your website. If you leave them after some duration of use, you can’t even export all your data in many cases, which contains all your email subscribers, feedback, reviews and comments.
That is why we don’t suggest this option to our customers.
Using a CMS:
CMS stands of Content management system. These web software are specially designed for effectively managing content of such websites. They are highly flexible and you get full authority to customize it according to your need.
For creating website using CMS like WordPress (which is world most used web software), you simply need to install WordPress in your hosting (which is super easy), install a free theme or premium theme, use the visual builder to create beautiful pages. Although this options is not as easy as using a website builder but with few learning (no coding needed for general purpose) you can create beautiful, responsive and fully functional website.
The advantage of this is, you have complete authority of your website. If you want a specific functionality to work unique to for in your website then you can hire a developer to create it. Also you can import / export all the web contents easily with click of a menu.
Dealing with traffic to portfolio website
- You can easily track each and every details of traffic coming to your website using google analytic.
- To increase traffic to your website you need to Optimize your website for search engine (Search Engine Optimization, SEO). Search engines like Google need the website to be structured in proper format to make the website contents easily readable by them. The more they can understand your website better and the more keyword your website matches to that of a searched by a user the higher it will rank in search result. And in turn higher traffic and more customers.
That’s it. Hope you got your basic portfolio website live. In case you need my help or advice, reach me at [email protected]
Please do share your views and experience with creating your portfolio website.
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