How to Make a Portfolio Website That Gets You Work

A portfolio website gets you work when a stranger can see your best pieces in ten seconds, understand what you offer and what it starts at, and write to you without hunting for an address. Six to twelve pieces with captions, a short about with real numbers, three services with starting prices, and a contact form: that is the whole brief. The portfolio template has exactly those sections; fill it in and it is live, free, this afternoon.

What should a portfolio website show?

Clients do not browse; they check. They open the site from your Instagram or an email, look at three or four pieces, decide whether you are the right kind of photographer or designer, and either write or leave. So the page is built for that check.

• The work first. The opening image is your strongest piece, large. Below it, a grid of six to twelve, each with a caption: the title and the client or the year. Captions turn pictures into evidence.
• Who you are, in a paragraph, with numbers that are true: years, clients, publications, exhibitions. Numbers are read; adjectives are skipped.
• Services with starting prices. "Portraits from €350" tells a visitor in one line whether to write. It also saves you ten emails a month.
• Two or three reviews with a name and a role, quoted with permission.
• Questions you answer on every call: how to book, turnaround, travel, who owns the photographs.
• A contact form on the same page, with the email and phone next to it for people who prefer those.

How do you choose and prepare the photographs?

Choose for range and consistency at the same time: different subjects, one eye. Then prepare them so the page stays fast.

1. Pick twelve candidates and cut to the eight that make you look like one photographer. If two pieces say the same thing, keep the better one.
2. Export at about 1,600 pixels on the long side for the opening image and 1,000 for the grid, as JPEG at quality 80 or as WebP. Each file should be well under 300 KB.
3. Write a caption and an alt text for each. The alt text describes the picture for people who cannot see it and for search engines: "the Matterhorn above a snow field at dawn", not "IMG_4821".
4. Keep the originals elsewhere; the site only needs the web sizes.

How do you build it with a template, step by step?

1. Open the portfolio template and its live preview. Dark by default; it switches to light in one setting.
2. Press Use this template, sign up (free), and the demo site is live at your-name.onstatpio.com.
3. On Site content, fill in Basics: your name, a headline in your own voice ("Photographs that feel like the day itself" is the demo's), and one sentence of what you do and where.
4. Replace the pieces under Selected work: upload the photo, write the title, the client or year, and a caption if it helps. The first piece takes the wide spot. Add a link where a piece has a fuller story elsewhere.
5. Write About in two paragraphs and add the numbers that are true. Upload a portrait if you want one beside it.
6. Set Services: three is right. Each has a name, a starting price and two lines of what is included.
7. Add Reviews and Questions, then your Contact details and links (Instagram, Behance, LinkedIn). The links also go into the structured data as your profiles.
8. Choose Look: dark or light, your brand and button colours. Press Publish.

The guide with screenshots: start a website from a template. Designers and developers who want a project list and an experience timeline may prefer the personal template; the steps are the same.

Should the page be dark or light?

Dark backgrounds make photographs glow and suit moody or cinematic work; light backgrounds suit bright, airy, product and wedding work and read better in daylight. The template is dark by default because most photographers choose it, and it switches in one setting if your work says otherwise. Whatever you pick, keep the text high-contrast; the template's colours are chosen to pass accessibility contrast checks in both modes.

How do you get found?

A portfolio is mostly found by name and by referral, so the page's job is to be the clear first result for your name and to look right when someone arrives from a link.

• Your name in the title: the template writes "Your Name: your headline" as the page title, which is what the name search needs.
• Structured data: the template writes you as a professional service with your offers, and lists your profile links, so search engines connect your name to your Instagram and Behance.
• Link previews: the opening image and your headline become the preview card when the link is shared, which is how most portfolios travel.
• Captions with client names are also the words a client searches when they remember "the photographer who shot the Fjord Quarterly cover".

What about a domain and the badge?

The template runs on Free Forever: one website at your-name.onstatpio.com with HTTPS, the contact form with 250 messages a month per website, analytics for 30 days, and a small Statpio badge in the footer. A domain with your own name and no badge is Solo Pro at $9 a month; connecting it takes minutes: connect your domain. Start free, and move the day a client asks for your website address out loud.