If you want to share your create talents with the world having a portfolio website gives you the most effective way to do so.
If you don’t have the time or the wherewithal to build one from scratch and you don’t want to spend a fortune to putting one together, your best approach will be to find an affordable website-building tool that will do the heavy lifting for you.
If you look for a cheap and easy solution your portfolio website could come up short in terms of quality or performance or might lack a feature you really want it to have.
Your creations can speak for themselves. They are impressive. Your portfolio website needs to be equally impressive to gain your visitors and potential clients or customers attention and trust.
There are certain features to look for in your search for a fast and affordable website builder. We’ll use the Portfoliobox portfolio-builder solutions to demonstrate what some of these features are and how you can best take advantage of them.
5 Portfolio Website Building Features that are Time Savers and Performance Boosters
A portfolio website should serve to impress its visitors and boost your business and/or reputation. A poorly built one can do just the opposite. It can be a detriment.
That is why it is so important to find a portfolio builder you can put your trust in. Here are 5 time-saving and quality-enhancing features you should look for to ensure the finished product will meet your objectives.
Let’s start with:
- Template mix-and-match page building
A theme-based website builder can be a real time saver but only if you can find a theme that can easily be customized to give you the layout and look and feel want. If it cannot, you could end up spending time doing a ton of customizing or deciding to start from scratch.
You want your portfolio website to reflect your unique creative abilities – at a minimum. The most promising way to do this is to look for a website builder (preferably a portfolio website builder) that allows you to mix and match templates to achieve what you want.
By doing so, you won’t have to worry about
- Allowing someone else to impose constraints on your site’s content
- Spending hours customizing a theme to achieve the correct look and feel
- Designing your portfolio website from scratch
Take Portfoliobox for example. You start with a black slate (not the same as starting from scratch) and build your site’s pages a section at a time.
Since there’s plenty of variety as to what each section template will look like, you should easily find examples that align well with what you expect your portfolio, testimonial, contact, and other pages to look like.
Filling in details can be faster that customizing and is usually more satisfying.
- All-in-one pricing and affordable and transparent monthly plans
When you’re in a hurry to create a website quickly and you come across a website builder that claims you can use if for “free”, or offers an “affordable” plan, life seems good.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
When it gets down to incorporating all the features you want and need, you suddenly discover that they are only available if you sign up for an upgrade. Even then, you may not get everything you need.
That’s not the case with every portfolio website builder, but to be certain you’ll get the features you need you should look for transparent upfront pricing.
That’s the best way to avoid an unpleasant surprise. Portfoliobox provides an excellent example of transparent upfront pricing.
Portfoliobox offers three pricing plans, Light, Pro, and Pro Plus (Pro is free for students). You can also select monthly pricing if it will work best for you.
The features of each of these plans are broken out, so you can see what’s included and what’s not:
- A custom domain name (on Pro plans)
- Web hosting and unlimited bandwidth
- SSL certification
- A mobile responsive website editor
- Image storage and protection
- eCommerce functionality is included in the platform
- SEO tools
- 24/7 customer support (chat)
- Four strategic business features for creatives
You obviously want to use a website builder that enables you to create an impressive online portfolio. But if you plan to offer products or services your site also needs to do an impressive job of streamlining your business dealings.
Your website builder should feature such things as:
Right-click disabling – if you want to protect your online work from theft. With Portfoliobox, this is done by toggling the Disable Right-Click feature as shown below.
Private client galleries – which will give you a fast and secure way to send artwork, photos, web designs, or whatever you are selling to your clients or customers.
There are other tools to create private client galleries, but why take the time and trouble to set up and coordinate with another platform when you can create one within Portfoliobox.
In addition to only having to upload and transfer your work once, this Portfoliobox feature also lets you manage your portfolio and your client/customer collaboration from a single platform.
Image watermarking – protects your work from thieves. It also streamlines your business dealings with your clients in that it enables you to make sure that clients have approved and paid for your products before they can put them to use.
Portfoliobox makes image watermarking easy and you can apply the feature to any client gallery.
Third-party integration – is another time-saving tool to look for.
With the third-party integration feature your portfolio builder can pull files into your website from a image or video editing platform.
- eCommerce integration
This is another example of the benefits of having your portfolio folder and being able to conduct business on the same platform. There are more than a few website builder solutions that feature eCommerce integration, but most place an emphasis on product pages as opposed to creating outstanding client portfolio galleries.
The Portfoliobox solution also avoid having to configure separate eCommerce settings since eCommerce is built right into the platform.
There are no add-ons needed either. It’s as easy as adding the store as a new page, choosing the template you want, and uploading your products.
- Timely customer service
A few website builders provide users with an FAQ page, most supply decent user documentation, and a some give you detailed documentation along with tutorial videos. Still, when you find yourself having to troubleshoot a website issue, wouldn’t you rather have a real person giving you expert advice when you most need it?
Attempting to troubleshoot a website problem on your own could take time, and the downtime you’re experiencing could cost potential business. The Portfoliobox platform offers the support you need when you need it.
When you’re on one of Portfoliobox’s Pro plans, you can go to the chat widget at the bottom of the screen to access instant customer support 24/7.
Building an impressive creative portfolio website the fast, affordable, and intuitive way
While there is no shortage of website builders out there that feature portfolio-building tools, Portfoliobox was built specifically for creatives who need a tool for building a website whose main attraction is an attention-getting portfolio and doing so quickly.
Portfoliobox just happens to be one of the best website builders for creatives out there. Website builders that have all the features outlined in this post are rare, and that is especially true for the business oriented features.
Portfolio is fast and easy to use, and its affordable pricing plans are transparent, so you know you’re getting what you need to get your portfolio website up and running in no time at all.