A website or a portfolio platform

What a portfolio platform does well

Presentation. Images look right, load properly and are arranged by people who understand how visual work should be shown, which is harder to get right than it looks.

Discovery among peers. Being visible where other professionals and some clients already browse has real value, particularly early in a career.

And it is quick. A credible presence in an afternoon, with no decisions about hosting, layout or structure, which is genuinely useful when the alternative is nothing.

It also removes an excuse. A creative professional who has been meaning to build a site for two years has something credible online in an afternoon, and something live beats something planned.

What it cannot tell a client

How you work. What the process is, what you need from them, how long it takes, what happens if they change their mind halfway through.

What it costs, or what determines the cost. Our page on pricing claims covers presenting that safely, and a profile rarely has anywhere to put it.

And whether you are available. A client ready to commission somebody wants a date, and a portfolio that ends without one loses them to whoever answered.

It cannot say who you work with either. A commercial client wants to know whether you have handled work like theirs, at their scale, under their kind of deadline, and a gallery answers none of that.

Work is not the same as evidence

A portfolio shows the output. A case study shows the problem, the constraint, the decision and the result, which is what persuades somebody with a difficult brief.

Clients hiring for anything commercial are buying judgment rather than aesthetics. Showing how you thought about a job does more than showing twelve more images of the outcome.

That material needs room and structure. Our page on topic clusters covers building a set of pages around a subject, which a profile cannot support.

What a site adds for a creative professional

The list below is what turns interest into an enquiry. A portfolio produces the interest and the items below are what a profile has no room for.

• How you work, step by step
• What it costs, or what determines that
• Your current availability and lead time
• Case studies with the reasoning, not only the result
• Who you work with and who you do not
• What you need from a client to start
• A contact route that reaches you directly

Being found for what you do

A profile is found by people browsing the platform. A site is found by somebody searching for a service in a place, which is a different and usually more commercial audience.

That difference matters most for local and specialist work. Somebody looking for a particular kind of photographer in a particular city is searching, not browsing a directory of peers.

Our page on specific searches covers where a small site can realistically compete, and specialist creative work is a good example of it.

Using both

Keep the portfolio and link it to your site prominently. The platform is the gallery and the site is the studio, and clients move naturally between them.

Keep the work identical in both. A portfolio showing different projects from your site suggests one of them is neglected, and a client cannot tell which.

And keep the site address everywhere. Our page on one business, one domain covers why the thing you own should be the destination.

Decide which one the enquiry arrives at. Two contact routes produce messages in two places, and the one you check less often is where the good enquiry will land.

Owning your images

Keep originals at full resolution outside the platform. Profiles are closed, accounts are lost and platforms shut down, and a portfolio that exists only there is a portfolio you can lose.

Check the terms about how your images may be used. Some platforms claim broad licenses, and that is worth reading before uploading a client's commissioned work.

Our page on images and copyright covers the wider point, including permissions from clients where the work is not yours to publish.