Step 1. Medium, Style, and Goals

Over years of creating websites, I’ve learned that a website with no goal in mind—no matter how inconsequential—isn’t useful at all. Also, the medium of your art is important to consider for choosing a WordPress theme and figuring out how you want to display your art as well.

The best answer is research. We looked into some examples of great visual art portfolio websites built with WordPress, and found some commonalities that seem to work best in the current trends.

Searchable Content

First, we found that many art websites, especially photography sites, have prominent search functions.

This makes a lot of sense in our day and age, with websites like Unsplash becoming the primary way to find stock photos. It also provides a much richer user experience with the ability to find exactly what interests you.

They key to doing this right is to have well-defined metadata and alt tags for the photos you upload, so that users can find them easily with their search terms. Adding alt tags and descriptions to images is a stock feature in WordPress. (Search functionality also comes with WordPress.)

Sorting Your Art by Category

Another built-in WordPress feature that many artists are taking advantage of is category sorting.

In this case, the artist has created their website using a basic WordPress blog feed, and provided links to categories above. It’s very easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, and makes browsing easier.

Many portfolio features, and portfolio-specific WordPress themes feature fancier ways to do this. You can easily create categories for specific media, series of work or projects, or even create collections that feature different themes or styles to showcase your versatility and interests.

Following and Shopping

If someone finds your art and falls in love, chances are they want more of it, and probably want to buy something. That’s why great visual art websites always feature social media links and either a link to buy art somewhere, or a built in store.

If you post your art on social media, you should have prominent social links, even at the top of the navigation as this artist does.

Also, why not sell your art yourself? Many great WordPress themes come ready to create an online store with complete functionality using the WooCommerce plugin. Here’s a video that explains how to set it up, if you choose to create a store.

Set Your Goals

What you want your website to achieve should determine how you design it and what features you’ll include. Think about what you are looking for, and try to translate it into features.

For example, if you want to sell art primarily, you may want to set up your site as a storefront, which displays your art like products. You don’t have to follow your goal so rigidly, of course, but it’s good to know what you want to get out of your site before you build it.

Step 2. Creating Your Art Website

If you have a goal in mind and some ideas about how you want to show your art, you’re ready to start building your art website. Follow these steps to get going.

Website Hosting and Domain Name

To build a website, you need a place to store it and a name/address for people to access it. This combination involves website hosting—a service that enables you to create a website on a secure server and connect it to the internet—and a domain—the address people type to access your site.

Website hosting companies, like Bluehost (the leader in WordPress hosting), provide hosting services and sometimes also domain names.

As an artist, you need to think about your medium, goals, and audience when choosing a domain name. For example, if you’re showcasing your work to build your name, you might consider yourname.com or yournameillustration.com, unless you already have a personal brand you’re working off of.

Install WordPress

Next, you need what’s known as a CMS, or content management software, to make changes to your website without writing code (unless you can code websites yourself). WordPress is the CMS of choice for many artists, and it powers nearly 30% of all websites.

WordPress is great for artists. It allows you to customize all aspects of the visual design, and the technical features, using your visual acumen. But you don’t need to know code or pay someone to do it. You can express yourself with your website without having to translate that to a developer.

The key to WordPress is that you start with a WordPress theme—a template. This theme includes many features and design elements you can use to create an amazing, responsive, up-to-date website. But first, you need to install the WordPress core software.

(Remember you need website hosting and a domain name before this step).

To install WordPress you simply need to find the one-click WordPress install button provided by most hosting companies. This will be found in your control panel, or cPanel, and it will only take a few seconds. Your host will then email you some log in credentials for WordPress. You can then sign in to your WordPress admin dashboard—where you’ll customize your site and create content—by accessing your domain with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a WordPress Theme

Because WordPress is open-source, there are millions of themes to choose from, and it’s easy to get stuck down a rabbit hole. The key to choosing your WordPress theme is finding the best design to start with, matched with the best features, responsiveness, and cleanest code. There are both free and paid WordPress themes (otherwise known as premium themes).

Premium WordPress themes include the most customization, best features, and cleanest up-to-date code, as well as dedicated developer support and updating. Free WordPress themes can work, but there are often too many limitations.

To help you get started, check out these great portfolio WordPress themes, or browse multipurpose themes for more options.

Install Your WordPress Theme and Import a Demo

Now, when you choose a WordPress theme, the next step is to install it on your website. So log in to your WordPress admin dashboard again, and follow this guide:

• How to Install Your WordPress Theme

If your WordPress theme came with one or more demo designs that align with your goals, this is a great way to save time and build a quality site without reinventing the wheel. Once your design is imported, you can still customize it and change anything you don’t like. Follow these guides to import your demo and begin customizing the demo content:

• Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
• Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Customize, Update, and Release Your Art!

Once your site is up and running with a WordPress theme, the sky is the limit. You can explore tons of WordPress plugins to add features to your website, optimize loading speed, and make your art and portfolio stand out. Check out these additional resources that will make your life easier and working with your website more enjoyable.

How to Install WordPress Plugins

A/B Test Features on Your Website

How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Website

How to Set Up Facebook Dynamic Ads for Your Artwork Store

Step 1. Identify Your Goals and Audience

Before you create a portfolio site, it’s important to nail down these two ideas. If you simply create a portfolio based on what you like, that’s fine, but it may not be effective.

First, establish what your goals are. Is this portfolio a place to demonstrate your work experience and skills for a specific role? Or is it to build an audience around your artwork or writing and even sell some stuff? Those are two very different outcomes with different paths to get there.

Next, who is your audience? If you’re angling for a specific job type, or a significant career change, it’s important to do your homework on the recruiters and hiring managers you’ll be talking to. This means researching and reading job descriptions from the type of companies you want to work for, identifying the keywords and job requirements, and translating that information into a strategy for what goes in your portfolio and how it’s designed.

Step 2. Create a Strategy and Sitemap

Once you feel comfortable with your understanding of the career you want and the people who you want to view your portfolio, it’s time to strategize and map it out. This is a vital step because it will shape the direction of your site design and the content you include.

Strategy

Depending on your goals and audience, you’ll need to assemble different content and create a navigation structure.

For example, if you’re trying to get a copywriting job, you’ll need to find what types of work and media are common among copywriting job requirements. Then, looking back at your history of work, try to assemble at least one example of each to include in your portfolio.

Aside from the work on your portfolio, determine what other features you’ll need to impress recruiters and managers or prospective clients. For example, if you’re advertising freelance work, there should be an easy way for clients to contact you right from your website. Or if you’re going for a writing position, or any for that matter, writing a blog about your profession can go a long way.

And remember, even if you don’t have the work to show yet, you can always create it. Taking classes with Udemy and creating example portfolio pieces is great experience and shows the scrappiness that a lot of companies look for.

Sitemap

Your sitemap is essentially a more concrete sketch of your strategy. Considering which pieces of work you need, and what information and features need to be included, how do all those pages and features work together, and where are they positioned on your site? What type of visual layout will present your work most effectively?

You can start by mapping out each step on paper, beginning with the home page. Define what you need on each page, and how the pages connect to each other. Keep your goal and audience in mind throughout this step, and don’t be afraid to make decisions. Your sitemap and layout are something you will continue to optimize and tweak over time.

Free Tools:

There are many free tools available to help you research your audience, determine goals and assist with your website project.

• Resume builder by uptowork – This can help you create your resume and discover best practices for communicating your skills and experience.
• The best portfolio websites around – Use this list to explore ideas and find well-done portfolios in your industry.
• Trello – Keep all your tasks organized and create a timeline to get your portfolio done.
• GlooMaps – Create a visual sitemap for free and never lose track of your layout.

Step 3. Create Your Portfolio Website

If you have a goal, audience and sitemap concept ready, creating your portfolio website will be a breeze. From here on out, it’s about setting up your basic website infrastructure and making some design choices.

Website Hosting and Domain Name

Even though we all visit websites every day, a lot of us don’t know how that visit actually happens. Websites are basically files stored on servers connected to the internet, which your computer accesses and loads remotely. Website hosting companies provide the infrastructure for storing your website for others to access, and often provide domain names, which are like registered addresses for your websites, also known as URLs.

Install WordPress

At MOJO Marketplace, WordPress is our primary tool because it offers amazing flexibility. With open source free and premium plugins, tools, and themes (design templates), you can really do anything without writing any code. And as you learn more and more, WordPress comes in handy for integrating cool technology and marketing tricks.

So once you have hosting, installing WordPress should be a breeze. You simply need to find the one-click WordPress install button provided by most hosting companies. This will be found in your control panel, or cPanel, and it will only take a few seconds. Your host will then email you some log in credentials for WordPress. You can then sign in to your WordPress admin dashboard—where you’ll customize your site and create content—by accessing your domain with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a Portfolio WordPress Theme

Next, you’ll need a WordPress theme to build your portfolio with. WordPress themes are like templates for your website, which include a user interface for customizing your design, layout, and features. At MOJO we sell premium WordPress themes, which offer much more flexibility, customization, and powerful designs. You can find free WordPress themes, but you often run into limitations within the first minutes of customizing. In addition, many of our premium themes include demo designs which you can import. These will save you hours of work, and can be customized to fit your unique goals.

We’ve assembled our favorite portfolio themes as a starting point, but there are many many options on our marketplace.

Import Your Theme Demo and Customize

If you found a great design, why not use it as a starting point rather than trying to reinvent the wheel? That’s where importing a WordPress theme demo comes in handy. Some themes feature one-click demo imports, and you can get it done in minutes.

Follow these guides to import your demo and start customizing:

1. Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
2. Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Put Your Work on the Map

Once you have a basic design in place, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of adding your content. Most portfolio themes feature a specific portfolio module where you can add pieces, categorize them, and have automatic formatting applied based on your needs. As you work toward customizing and refining your portfolio, check out these guides to gain more insights:

More Tips On Creating a Web Portfolio

5 Ways to Improve Your Website with Simple A/B Tests

6 Copywriting Techniques for the Best SEO

How to Install WordPress Plugins that Improve Your Website

1. Mochi

When it comes to portfolios, creating a personal brand is important. The Mochi portfolio WordPress theme provides an amazing masonry portfolio layout for displaying your projects, art, or photography, plus color and font customization tools to get your brand right. You can customize most aspects of the design right from the theme options panel in WordPress, and never worry about changing any code.

Try Mochi

2. Portfolio

This portfolio theme offers stunning design with multiple layout options to fit your list of projects. It also comes with well-crafted project templates for your portfolio that make it easy and straightforward to organize the most important information.

Try Portfolio

3. Optimus

The Optimus portfolio theme includes pre-made designs for all types of websites, including 3 portfolio demos in light and dark style. The graphics and typography in the pre-made designs are each amazing in their own right, and give you plenty of flexibility to capture your personal brand and show off your work. This theme comes packed with options and hundreds of page templates to work from. For someone who’s a novice WordPress user, there may be too many features. However, you can simplify a lot of the options by choosing a demo design.

Try Optimus

4. Portfolio

This portfolio theme from Organic Themes is one of the cleanest, hippest portfolio themes around. This one is perfect for showcasing photos or artwork that demand large scale images and little to no junk around them. The logo placement and dropdown menu style make the design standout—perfect for a visual arts or creative professional.

Try Portfolio

5. Jayo

You will have trouble finding a cleaner, quicker theme than the Jayo portfolio. This theme has an excellent sense of space and typography, and also does a great job of layering color tones (especially if you start with the demo design). With the Essential Grid plugin, customizing your projects is easy, and the portfolio tag sorting animations make a lasting impression.

Try Jayo

6. Zenith

The Zenith portfolio theme has a plethora of options and demo designs ready to import with one click. Easily build pages with the Visual Composer plugin and create the best portfolio for your work with tons of customization options. This theme is robust, and may have too many options for a beginner, but if you need a lot of flexibility, it’s a great choice.

Try Zenith

7. Edge

The Edge portfolio provides attractive full-width presentation for creative agencies or professionals to present solutions and projects. The demo design is packed with amazing layout, typography, and eye-catching animations that give your work a professional presentation. You can edit/add to pages easily using the Visual Composer page builder and present all your social media touch points nicely above your navigation menu.

Try Edge

Step 1 – Build Your Website with WordPress

While you can use a site-builder platform, such as Wix or Squarespace, we strongly recommend WordPress. The WordPress community is infinite and the platform offers more flexibility. You want to change themes? No problem. Add a function? There’s a free plugin for just about any purpose. Bottom line: WordPress is the long-term solution because of it’s flexibility and support. Plus you’ll learn a lot more.

Choose a Domain Name and Hosting Service

When you build your own site, you’ll need to find a domain name and hosting service. Your domain name is like an address, and the host is like a house. MOJO Marketplace is partnered with hosting brands, such as bluehost and Hostgator. They’re all great, but bluehost is especially great for WordPress users. It’s up to you, but I personally love doing it all right from bluehost, so I’ll show you how that works.

For a personal website or portfolio of your work, it’s best to choose a domain with your name in it. Why? Well, it’s about as clear as it gets, fairly short, and easy to remember. But also, having your name in the domain gives you some control over what comes up when people search your name on the internet.

Once you create an account, you can search for domains in bluehost. If yourname.com isn’t available, you have a couple options. One, you can use a different Top Level Domain, or TLD. (That’s the “.com” part of the URL). For instance, if you do video work, yourname.tv could be a good choice. Alternatively, you could add your expertise to the url–yournameillustration.com or yournameaccounting.com.

Install WordPress to Your Domain (with One Click)

When you sign up with bluehost’s hosting plan, you’ll get a free domain and one-click WordPress installation. This takes a lot of the confusing work out of buying a domain, pointing it to a host, and uploading WordPress to the cPanel. (If that sentence makes no sense to you right now, don’t worry, that’s why I’m suggesting bluehost). All you have to do is click this button in your cPanel.

Choose a WordPress Theme for Your Portfolio

Choosing a WordPress theme might be the hardest part of this whole process. There are too many quality themes to choose from, and it really comes down to personal preference once you start using the theme.

Choosing a WordPress theme might be the hardest part of this whole process.
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There are free themes and premium themes. Free themes are great, but they lack a lot of the features premium themes offer, such as drag-n-drop page builders, high-quality demos (a pre-configured site you can import and add your content to), and options in the visual customizer.

For a personal website, you want either a portfolio-specific theme or an all-purpose theme that you can customize to your liking.

For example, the theme we use for the MOJO blog, Highend, offers a ton of customization options right from the WordPress dashboard. You can change the layout, choose different headers and menus, set up logos for different types of screens, and much more. Here are just a couple of the options out of a huge list. (You also don’t have to mess with the options if you use default settings or import a demo).

At the minimum, if you want your website to stand apart from the crowd, so your theme should allow you to customize the following:

• Layout
• Navigation style
• Colors
• Fonts

Also, there aren’t too many of them out there anymore, but don’t mess with a theme that isn’t responsive. People access the web from all sorts of devices, so you need your website to account for that.

Step 2 – Install and Customize Your Theme

When you install WordPress, you’ll receive an email with login credentials (you can change them in the general settings tab of the WordPress dashboard). You can always access your dashboard by typing “yourdomain.com/wp-admin” into your browser. This will open the login prompt.

Once you’re inside, you can install your theme by going to Appearance > Themes, clicking upload, then upload theme, and finally click “choose file” and locate the .zip file for your theme.

Once you’ve installed your theme, you can play with it and see if it gets you where you want to go. A couple tips:

• Use the theme’s documentation to help you make progress. Here’s an example from Highend’s documentation.
• Try the theme test-drive plugin to test out multiple themes without changing the current one (useful if you’re updating the theme for a website you’ve already built and have driven traffic to).
• Be patient–it’s hard, but there is a fast learning curve–and get help if you need it.
• You don’t have to (obvi) but if your purchase a theme from MOJO, you can swap it out for one of equal value if it doesn’t work for you.

Customizing a WordPress Theme

Before you dive in and start working your magic, make sure you have some idea of what content your putting on the site. We’ll go into detail on this in a moment, but for now here’s a list of stuff you’ll want to include. Just so you can start imagining how you want employers to experience your site. In other words, what information are you including, what order is it presented in, and how is it presented?

• Home page
• Description or bio
• Work experience
• Skills
• Education
• Projects
• Contact link or info
• Resources (like a pdf resume)

Depending on the features of your WordPress theme, you can customize certain aspects from the dashboard, and others from the visual customizer. Just click Appearance > Customize and you’ll see all the options in this panel.

Here, most themes allow you to alter the site identity, menus, add widgets, and more. As you can see, Highend gives you color customization options right here, so you can give the site your own feel. However, all of the general layout settings for Highend are accessed through the dashboard under a tab labeled Highend.

Check your theme’s documentation and search Google and YouTube for answers. Every theme works a little different, but as long as the options are there, you’ll be able to adjust things the way you like.

Step 3 – Create Your Pages

For this next step, I recommend creating pages for each category of content you include. You don’t by any means have to do it this way. You can create a cool one page website, or combine it all together like a standard resumé. Whatever you do, just make sure it’s clear and functional, and represents your work well.

To have the best control of your layout and opportunity to make it more unique, I recommend using a theme that has Visual Composer or a similar page building plugin. It’s a lot harder to use the basic WordPress text editor to create compelling page layouts that don’t just look like a standard blog post.

Home Page

It only takes a few seconds for a recruiter to leave your website. Your homepage is a chance to shine and make them want to stay. In order to do that, you’ll need to sell it.

It only takes a few seconds for a recruiter to leave your website.
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• Create a logo or choose a photo of yourself that can represent your personal brand. Here’s a free tool that lets you combine shapes, icons, and text to create a logo. And there’s a free alternative to Photoshop you can use to edit photos or create graphics.
• Craft a headline for your website that clearly states who you are and what you do. This can be as simple as your job title, or the task you do best. For example: “Jeremy Winger – Animator” or “Teddy Songer – Compositor.” This should be added to your site identity as well as displayed somewhere on the home page. The site identity can be customized in the visual customizer by clicking Appearance > Customize.
• Write a bio or statement of intent. This is kind of like a two sentence cover letter. Here are some good tips for what to say from The Muse, but make sure it’s straight to the point and voices what you can do, why you do it, and what you’re looking for. It’s good to get inspiration from other people in your field (try Googling your job title and portfolio for good examples).
• Make your navigation clear and present. Each section you should allow the recruiter to easily access and read about you without being overwhelmed or skipping over important details. You can create menus in Appearance > Menus. (Make sure your mobile menu works just as well as the desktop version, too.)

Experience

This part will be a lot like the experience section of a resumé, but cooler. Because you have more space, you can do more with it. Try including images, icons, or whatever your inspiration tells you to do. Here are some tips:

• Take a close look at job descriptions and try to imagine how your experience makes you a good fit.
• As you list what you did at each job or in school, try to align your experience with the skills and requirements from the job descriptions.
• Identify goals and denote the results.
• Use power words like created, achieved, improved, resolved, and mentored.
• Follow this excellent guide from Uptowork on tailoring your resumé to fit a job description (very useful research and tips for using keywords and selling your skills).

Skills

I think this section is optional, so it’s up to you. For example, many designers will list their proficiencies in design softwares (often using a visual representation like a progress bar or stars). However, I think that the more effective strategy is to demonstrate your skills by showing what you accomplished with the software in the experience section.

Education

This is especially important for students, and if you don’t have much job experience yet, this will be your touchstone.

• List your university(s) and the dates you attended (sometimes it’s a good idea to list your GPA).
• If there are courses you took that are especially relevant to your job search, list them here and include a portfolio link or download for projects you completed.
• Display any honors or awards you earned. This is also a good opportunity to explain how you earned them.
• Discuss classes you taught, how you planned the curriculum, and what the results were.
• Also, this is where you can talk about clubs or organizations you’re a part of. Describe your role and the impact you’ve made in each.

Projects

Many themes (especially portfolio-specific designs) feature a portfolio element. For example, the Highend theme has a portfolio tab in the dashboard where you can configure portfolio items and categories.

After you add your portfolio items, you can create a portfolio page (or multiple if you have different categories of work you want to showcase). The way it works with most themes is you create a page and change the template from default to portfolio (as you can see to the right). You can then assign this page to be your home page (if that’s what you want) or add it to your navigation menu as a custom link.

Include images, links, and downloads for each project and clearly describe the goals, how you approached the project, the results you achieved, and what you learned.

Contact Info

Contact forms are a subtle but important addition to your portfolio site. There are handfuls of WordPress plugins that add this functionality, and some themes come with contact functions already built in. It may not be used very often, but if someone lands on your site and wants to connect, it’s a nice feature.

The other advantage is you don’t have to put up any information for spammers–they have to contact you first. Here are a few plugins you can explore. Choose one you like. And remember, you can connect your site email (yourname@yourdomain.com) which can be configured in your hosting cPanel.

Resources

It’s a good idea to include a page of resources. You can include a link to this page in the footer of your site, using widgets. As shown to the left, you can add a text widget that includes a link in the footer area (most themes have this ability or an alternative widget area). Include important stuff like your resume and project downloads or links to publications, websites, or organizations you’re a part of.

Many recruiting softwares require you to upload a resumé (and most employers want a pdf to keep on file for reference). Here’s a good tool to create a resumé for free.

There’s no doubt that creating a portfolio and personal website is hard and time-consuming. I know that at the end of the work day, I’m hard-pressed to put in more hours representing the work that I’ve already done. But I can assure you, it pays off. And reading, rereading, rereading, and rereading the content you make is important. You want to avoid any kind of typos or errors if possible.

Also, using WordPress is easy compared to building a site from scratch. But it’s hard. It takes grit and patience. So, I’ve provided a list of resources below to help you through the process. Enjoy, and please share your work with us in the comments below or on our social media channels. And ask questions. We’re not perfect, but we want to help. Thanks for reading!