September 11

Create a Portfolio on a WordPress Website

Creating a digital portfolio is one of the most popular applications for WordPress themes. But building a successful portfolio site is not easy, for this content and design you should add links and texts that must reflect the full list of your portfolio’s projects and the reviews from the clients that you have had. In order to develop a successful portfolio with a WordPress theme, it is necessary to adhere to certain rules and recommendations that will be disclosed below.

Plugins for adding portfolio to WordPress sites

8Theme offers you free WordPress plugins to make your site a full-time portfolio working for you 24/7:

Nimble Portfolio

Nimble Portfolio is a powerful plugin for portfolio and galleries; this is the best plugin to showcase their portfolio, photos, videos and media. You can easily sort them by using the filtered tabs.

This adaptive plug-in, so it will work fine on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Highlights:

Video support of Youtube, Vimeo, Quicktime video sharing services;
Built PrettyPhoto gallery for photos, video and PDF viewer;
Features easy categorization and sorting/filtering;
Customizable default’s cover with 3 adaptive designs.

OTW Portfolio Light

OTW Portfolio Light is an adaptive plugin for the portfolio WordPress theme. This simple and easy to configure plugin allows you to create great portfolio on your site without any bloat. You will be able to classify the elements of the portfolio. The plugin has a 3-column template to display portfolio items on the page or in the search. For a portfolio this plugin will provide you with options such as title, content, website customer a short review and the recommended image. Portfolio can be inserted in the record or page using shortcodes. One code will display the elements of the portfolio, using the pagination; the other will allow you to filter the items by category. The size of thumbnails and single images can be changed with the settings. The plugin has everything you need to add to your minimalist portfolio website. There are options for filtering and item numbering portfolio. This plugin offers two templates: Portfolio Filterable and Portfolio Paginated.

Awesome Filterable Portfolio

If you need a simple and customizable filterable portfolio to a WordPress theme, this plugin is for you. Awesome Filterable Portfolio is ideal for designers, artists, photographers and other creative people who want to showcase samples of their work. An interesting feature is the ability to configure the plugin properties of the animation. Awesome Filterable Portfolio is a useful plugin that allows you to add a lot of information to the elements of the portfolio. For example, you can include a complete description, the name of the project, the client, in which it was created and the URL-address of the project. All information is stored in the types of user accounts. Thumbnail images should be created manually, which brings some disadvantages, however, the plug-in allows you to create categories and assign them to the elements. When a visitor clicks on the different categories, the new image will load faster, using jQuery animations.

Tips for building a portfolio with WordPress themes

Create content that is relevant to your goals

The main reason why people come to your site is viewing of certain content. Design and comfort define the interface is not so much the success of your site as interesting and informative content. The portfolio website is necessary to combine the purpose for which you are creating this resource. Make sure that all the projects in the portfolio and the data on them will be relevant to your needs and interests of your audience.

Imagine that you are looking at your own website on a WordPress theme through the eyes of a potential customer. What would you like to see on such a resource? What are you interested in the first place? What's the first step separates the important from the unimportant to you as a consumer of content? By answering these questions, you can get a full idea of what content should be on the site.

Create a comfortable and well-designed portfolio pages

You always have to focus on quality rather than quantity. It is vitally important to choose only the best projects that can become an ornament to your collection and bring your positive image. Adding to the interesting projects of the portfolio of a maximum of details, you can hold the user's attention. A good example of a similar theme is Infinum. It looks like a quality portfolio with details, photos and screenshots - everything that describes the information on the site. Add a maximum of details and use a few simple tools:

quality images in high resolution to complement your project information;
focus on the benefits of your project, not just a simple enumeration of its characteristics;
add interactive media content, video, supplements, tabs with different data and media files.

Most premium WordPress themes use slideshows, galleries, embedded video and many other advanced media tools. Use them to make your interactive portfolio and saturated.

Add a button with a call to action on each page of your site

One of the common mistakes when creating a portfolio - forget about adding buttons that call-to-action or translate the user's attention to the target landing pages using the links and buttons. Links of this kind will help to move quickly with the project, interested potential customer to your page with contacts, prices, or other landing page on your site. The button with a link and instructions to direct the action is a mandatory attribute of a website’s portfolio. Buttons with a call to action should lead to a page with contacts, a page with a quick application form or a form to add a specification, a page with the prices for your services. Thus users will be able to faster and more convenient "access" to the stage of placing the order for your services. To quickly create and insert these buttons and links, you can use plugins like Shortcodes Ultimate or CPO Shortcodes to work with content and pages on a website.

Make fewer distractions on a website

As the content on the site by the addition of new projects, information on the pages may be a lot that reduces the effectiveness of its perception that users are not confused in the content, and the fullness of the portfolio did not interfere in the perception of information on the website, you can create multiple partitions projects. It is recommended that the tabs, lists, additional menus. Selecting and structuring the content on the website, always look at your main objectives and how the content will be seen by search engines and your target audience. Remove all irrelevant content that will benefit your project, reducing the "water" and nonessential content relevant to change the structure of the information flow - and it will improve the overall impression of a website:

irrelevant other pages on the site;
marketing ploy did not follow the main purpose and do not meet the rest of the goals;
obsolete items for WP portfolios that do not reflect the quality of your current work;
the lack of logical structure and categories for a portfolio.