Portfolio or No Portfolio?

Procrastination hit hard yesterday.

Instead of writing a blog post I decided to fiddle with my website. It’s not the smartest out there in Cyberland, but it has served me well over the past few years. However, things have to change eventually.

I decided to add a portfolio section. This is something I’ve toyed with for a while, but unlike many other editors who can happily share their projects, there is a fair proportion of my work that for one reason or another can’t be shared. I have had endless worries that a portfolio with few examples is perhaps worse than no portfolio. Would it be of any help to prospective clients anyway? But the reviews for these books are pretty damn good.

I came down on the side that some sort of portfolio would be better than none, so I gathered together eleven of my favourite jobs and added them to the page. It took me hours. Honestly. Basically this was because I was fiddling with trying to find a way to have a nice click link to the books’ details. I decided on linking to Amazon because, let’s face it, that’s where most people go to look at book details these days.

Eventually I managed to produce a fairly good portfolio page. Well, at the very least it adds some colour rather than having a boring list of work produced.

So why did I decide to bite the bullet? Here are five reasons to add a portfolio page:

1. It’s good to allow prospective clients to see what you’ve done. Even a small number of projects will give customers an idea of what you are about, even if some of pieces of work are not within your specialism (for example, the cookbook I compiled and edited last year).
2. It gives clients something solid to see. Despite telling people what type of projects you work on it’s good to show them. We live in a visual age – pictures are good.
3. You can showcase your best work, your favourite work or those projects that were quirky but fun.
4. It allows clients to check you out. Ok, they can do that anyway, but a portfolio page is a quick way of seeing what’s what, and they can go and have a look at the works themselves.
5. You can add to it as and when you want. Just worked on a fabulous project and allowed to share it? Pop it on your page and let everyone know.

So that’s why I did it.

Will it be of any use to anybody? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. I think it looks ok.

If you have the time, please pop along and let me know what you think. There’s a nice range of books there, and all of them were lovely to work on. Some I proofread, but most I edited (I’ve left out those I indexed as I concentrate more on editing these days).

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Do you have a portfolio page? What do you include and how often do you update it? Has it been useful to you? Please share your thoughts, there is a lot of information on the internet about how to add a portfolio to your website, but few articles on what is useful.