Looking to create a great portfolio? Here’s a ton of free help.
From inspiration and advice to tools and website builders, the internet is full of handy resources to help you improve your portfolio. However, it can be difficult to find the good stuff within a sea of dross. So in this post, we help you out by cherry-picking the best free resources on offer.
If you’ve found a cool freebie that we’ve missed, please let us know in the comments below!
01. Free ebook
This mini ebook gives advice on how to build a portfolio
Six Steps to Building the Perfect Portfolio is a free mini ebook from Flywheel, a WordPress platform built specifically for agencies, freelancers and creatives. With a fun and friendly design, it explains how to ensure your online portfolio is in tip-top shape. Admittedly, at just six pages, it’s not the most comprehensive guide, but the advice is useful and it’s totally free to download (in exchange for your email address) here.
02. Free WordPress themes
Hatch is a simple photography and portfolio WordPress theme that’s optimised for mobile browsing
The world’s leading platform for building websites, WordPress powers more than 60 million websites, so anyone using it to create and host their own site is in good hands. If you don’t have design or coding smarts, you’ll want to use a prepared template (known as a theme), and the good news is that there are plenty of excellent themes available for free.
You’ll find a great selection to choose from in our roundup of the best free WordPress themes, such as Hatch, shown above. Or, if none of those float your boat, this post on our sister site Tech Radar lists the best places to find free WordPress themes.
03. Free platform
Art director Andre Fairclough’s portfolio on Behance
One of the simplest ways to create a portfolio presence online is using Behance, Adobe’s free platform for showcasing your designs. You only get a Behance page rather than a separate website, but by presenting your work on a platform that attracts millions of visitors, you’ll probably have more people actually looking it as a result.
You’ll also join huge community of creatives, such as illustrator, designer and art director Andre Fairclough (shown above), who are encouraged to support and critique each other. Plus there are other opportunities to improve your portfolio, such as by taking part in biannual Behance portfolio reviews.
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Portfolio Box lets you build a bespoke portfolio website for free
If you want to build your own portfolio bespoke website but can’t face the idea of tinkering about in WordPress, Portfolio Box is a popular service that allows you to do so for free, even for commercial use.
Aimed at photographers, designers and other creatives who want a portfolio website with customisable design and simple user interface, the platform offers you cool features including galleries, blogs, an ecommerce facility and the ability to embed video.
The free option allows you to include a maximum of 50 images, 10 products and 10 pages on your portfolio website – although for a monthly fee you can exceed this, as well as gaining access to a custom domain name and hosting, pro templates and Google Analytics integration.
05. Free inspiration
Check out other creatives’ portfolios at Inspiration Is
When you’re starting to create a portfolio from scratch, it can be useful to check out other creatives’ portfolio sites for inspiration. There are a number of portfolio galleries online where you can find the latest, including One Page Love (single-page portfolios), Awwwards.com (award-nomimated portfolios), Inspiration Is (Behance portfolios), Folio Focus (web design portfolios) and UI Parade (portfolios of UI designers).
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
