Technical Illustrators.org Forum

Can anyone suggest or comment on portfolio websites, or what they are using? I am going to obviously register my own domain name, but I wonder about the portfolio sites out there. I am seriously considering either Behance or Cargo Collective, but not sure of which one to go with. Is it true that you need to apply and send samples of your work before you are allowed to be a member of cargo collective?

The cost vs. benefit of free portfolio sites can't be beat. At best, you find an audience, then draw them to your site to seal the deal. At worst, you're out the 20 minutes or so it took to upload your work. I'm on pretty much everything I could find, Flickr, Behance, Illustrationmundo, Coroflot, Dribbble...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Cargo Collective seems more like a hosted service that you'd build your website/portfolio on rather than a free portfolio site? Check out Clint Ford's site http://cargocollective.com/ford

Paid portfolio sites should only be considered after you've exhausted every free avenue, and done some research to compare different sites' traffic, search/discovery tools, promotion efforts and fees. I've never paid for this type of thing, so I can't tell you if they're worthwhile.

Good topic for a thread.

I never considered any free services as I was willing to cover the cost of hosting and domain.....maybe $120 a year.

Granted with this method there is not guarantee of traffic, you rely on your own SEO abilities, word of mouth, social media, etc... I built mine more as an online presence for applying to jobs/contracts. I don't really expect anyone to stumble across my site.

I built a Wordpress site with a free theme from http://graphpaperpress.com. Themeforest is another great source to find really professional looking themes that only cost about $30.

I think it is more professional to have one's own business website - that is one that you pay for. Hosting is not terribly expensive and there are many good ones with no down time at all and unlimited bandwidth.

As for being visible, it is probably good to be seen in many places (participating in forums and galleries), but counting on being singled out of 15,000+ other creative individuals at a place dedicated to creative's is pretty unrealistic. I think I am pretty good at what I do, but I know I am not the best there is. Put me in a line up with other creative's and I would bet I would not be the first choice. As such, I spend my time creating my web site and developing my business away from that type of direct competition. Not that I haven't tried the other way, but I have sure found it to be a waste of time and energy trying to be visible in that kind of environment.

I have found that having a large gallery on my business website with many varied images garners some pretty good traffic from those doing Google image searches. Some of this traffic has paid off with contacts.

jamesprovost wrote:The cost vs. benefit of free portfolio sites can't be beat. At best, you find an audience, then draw them to your site to seal the deal. At worst, you're out the 20 minutes or so it took to upload your work. I'm on pretty much everything I could find, Flickr, Behance, Illustrationmundo, Coroflot, Dribbble...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Cargo Collective seems more like a hosted service that you'd build your website/portfolio on rather than a free portfolio site? Check out Clint Ford's site http://cargocollective.com/ford

Paid portfolio sites should only be considered after you've exhausted every free avenue, and done some research to compare different sites' traffic, search/discovery tools, promotion efforts and fees. I've never paid for this type of thing, so I can't tell you if they're worthwhile.

Cargo costs about 40 bucks a year for the premium version, there's a free version also but it limits the amount of projects you can post and themes you can use.
My site is sort of a mutt, which I'm getting bored with, only the portfolio section is cargo, the rest is tumblr or my own html. I'm thinking of redoing my site and going all wordpress with a nice theme from themeforest.

Any major headaches with a full on wordpress site James?

I occasionally run into problems with WordPress... an update may break something, or .htaccess stops working right. It's an open source project and sometimes that really shows. There's a support forum, but no tech support like a commercial product. Still, I couldn't recommend anything else...

Wordpress is fine as long as you remember to keep things simple.
It's fun to take an existing theme and hack the heck out of the CSS.
Just remember to build a proper child theme and you should be alright.
Of course the Themeforest themes have really good integrated CSS editors,
so there's probably no need to create a child theme.

I stepped into the Wordpress world just a few months ago. So far so good. I did look at a couple of other options such as Squarespace but decided to go with Wordpress (self hosted). I'd previously used Dreamweaver to build sites for myself and a few clients, but I'm certainly no web guy and always found them a pain to maintain.

I've got a couple of sites - a small one for my training work: http://www.MikeAbbott.info and one for the studio side of the business at http://www.vantagegraphics.co.uk

I've built the training one first as it's a small and simple text based site - so I can get used to the Wordpress way of working.
I'll soon be replacing my embarrassingly out of date studio site with another wordpress install - based on the same theme, but with a much more graphical content.

I do agree with James - if you want to get known you need to get your name and work out there by any means possible.

I decided to go with a full on Cargo site and I'm very happy with the decision so far. After tweaking my text i'm getting much better results in searches and there are a lot of improved features with cargo lately. I'm planning on doing a more in depth review on the main site shortly.

I moved my second domain to Cargo and really like it. The ability to change templets with a single click is pretty cool. http://www.hatchillustrations.com/