When you’re just starting out as a student freelancer, your portfolio can determine whether you are successful in maintaining a steady stream of clientele. The main focus of your portfolio should be to impress potential clients or even employers, but I see many trends in portfolio designs that may be hindering students from marketing themselves effectively.

1. Poor Grammar and Spelling

If you can’t take the time to edit your copy on your portfolio, then most clients won’t take the time to read through it. Having bad grammar and spelling can come off as laziness, just like spelling mistakes in e-mails. Make sure you have someone else look over your portfolio content before hitting the publish button.

2. Highlighting Your Weaknesses

It’s great that you’re a student just starting out, but be weary of showcasing this on your portfolio. By telling visitors your age, you might come of as “young and inexperienced” (even though this might not be the case). Focus on your areas of expertise. For example, “I write clean and efficient HTML5 & CSS3 for WordPress.”

3. Including All Your Work in Your Portfolio

It can definitely be tempting to including every piece of work you’ve done in your online portfolio. Instead, do the opposite. Hand-pick only the best pieces for your portfolio and remember that quality is always better than quantity.

4. No Context to Your Work

A basic explanation of who the client was, your though process throughout the project and the outcome of the project is needed when displaying your portfolio pieces. If you just slap up images of projects you’ve worked on, your viewer won’t have any deeper understanding as to why you made certain design decisions.

5. No Organisation

Your portfolio should be well organized - with a beginning, middle and end. Try to place projects next to each other that flow nicely from one to the other. You should allow your visitor to easily navigate around your portfolio with no confusion. If you have a well-organized portfolio, this will allow you to build a portfolio presentation around a solid platform of pieces.

6. Information Overload

You want to be able to create a good balance of presenting enough information about yourself as a professional, but not overloading them with unnecessary facts. Chances are, clients who visit your portfolio aren’t familiar with the type of work you do and are very unsure whether or not they should hire you. Only present them with the crucial information first: your name and main area of speciality, experience and education. These credentials will make you appear highly qualified at what you do, even as a student.

7. Neglecting Your Portfolio

Once you complete your portfolio, don’t let it sit for too long. Always be updating your portfolio to realign with your career goals. If you can, always replace school projects with real client projects.

8. Confusing Navigation

Although your design portfolio is a great way to experiment with new technologies, it isn’t the place to practice bad habits in user experience. Always make sure your navigation is first and foremost and that all your links are working.

9. Using Dribbble as Your Portfolio

Do not present clients with snippets of your work. Always show view-scale, high quality images of your work. Clients want to see they you are capable of designing full-design solutions - not snippets for popularity on Dribbble.

10. You Don’t Have a Portfolio

There’s no excuse for not having a portfolio. There are an abundance of free services such as Cargo and Carbonmade that you can use as a temporary portfolio. Even if you use a WordPress or Tumblr theme, no one will really care that you didn’t design your own portfolio, especially your potential clients.

You can more posts from Janna Hagan at Student Guide Web Design!

TAGS: 10 Mistakes Design Dribbble Portfolio Wordpress