Continuing with our Freelance 101 – A Suggestive Guide (part one available here!) , this week Web Tips Magazine wants to point out some fantastic free and paid online services for you to host your portfolio.

An online portfolio is a necessary and convenient way to showcase your works.  The benefit for you is that you don’t have to mess with the website you’ve never created, or the domain name, the hosting and everything else that comes with going the traditional self-hosted method.  Using a service that is created explicitly for uploading and maintaining a portfolio is a great way for freelancers to not just display their works, but gain momentum to their careers, link up with other like-minded individuals and receive exposure to possible clients.

It’s not just for the novices. Some experienced freelancers use these online portfolio services to help broaden their capture market and run them simultaneously with their personal portfolio sites and blogs. The benefit of doing this is quite obvious, further exposure to your work, social media hounds help pass on the links and search engines pick up your name and links to your site – food for thought for any struggling freelancer out there.

Web Tips Magazine has searched out some examples for you, some free, some paid, some traditional and non-traditional solutions.  Take a look and see if any of the following solutions could work for you.

Carbonmade

Carbonmade has not only a free service with limited projects and pictures you can upload but also a paid service.  No html experience is necessary.  It’s easy to use management tools will allow you to have up to 5 projects with up to 35 images on the free service.  It includes building a profile page to give information about you, allows you to order your projects however you want them to display and also includes uploading Flash projects.  You can also use Google Analytics to monitor your traffic to your portfolio.

The paid service allows you to have up to 50 project with up to 500 hi-res images and 10 high quality videos.  For $12 a month you not only increase your project and images, you get the feature to upload videos.  With no super-compressed videos – if it plays in Quicktime, you can display the video here.

One of the drawback to this service is that you can’t design your portfolio page to match in more with your company identity.  Your styling is limited.

FigDig

FigDig is another free portfolio.  Some of the cool features for this online portfolio is that you can upload and view 1224 x 792 high definition portfolio samples as well as FigDig has safeguards in place to help prevent theft of your work as well.

With this being a free service you are limited to only uploading 8 pieces.  But you do have the portfolio ratings so that you can rate your best work so if someone does a search, your best pieces will display.

The profile piece will let you input or even upload in .pdf format things that you want viewers to see about you.  With the ability to upload in .pdf format, you can focus more on your creative talent rather than the “sell me to anyone” details.

Every few months, the FigDig team will vote one member to the FigDig Hall of Fame which wins them an Apple iPod Nano as well as having their work displayed for all to see.

Coroflot

Coroflot is not only an online portfolio but also has a job board section.  Your portfolio is free of charge, not only free but has unlimited amount of uploads allowed.

This service will give you details on your traffic, an easy-to-remember URL to point your visitors too.  You can make your portfolio public or confidential.  The grouping and ordering of your projects and pictures is as easy as drag and drop.

The best thing about this service is the built in job board.  You can get new job postings that match your criteria via email or RSS feeds.

Envato

Envato and any of it’s marketplaces, such as ThemeForest, Graphic River, or Video Hive is probably not the first place people think of when it comes to portfolio hosting.  However, I can tell you from experience that if you are looking to firstly improve your skills, and second, gain new clients, this is a really great resource. Think about it for just a few moments, you are trying to make your mark on the world of freelance, or you are currently attempting to push yourself through college, so you are trying to build your portfolio, you have no money for a domain, hosting etc then why not create your portfolio pieces.

Envato’s marketplaces cover almost every creative field there is from html and css, to video animations and even music and sound files, so it doesn’t matter what your creative talents are, they offer a place to join a community to receive help and advise, and a review team to ensure your work is up-to standard. Once accepted this work is then sold and you receive a share of the revenue. All your work is tied to your account and you have a portfolio page displaying all your current items across all the marketplaces (for those that are multi-talented) – you can use this to drive traffic to your items, gain exposure and earn some extra income at the same time, not just from item sales but buyers will contact you with regards to alterations, modifications and even complete new projects.

The draw back for using the Envato sites for your portfolio are that if  your are trying to get clients, they will see the $12, or start browsing and they will loose your showcased works.  They amy decide it’s better to purchase one of the items through this avenue rather than sign up for contract work with you.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt is a simple and free online portfolio source, but has a huge following.  This service has an audience of over 12 million viewers.  You can set up your profile and create galleries to start building your fan base.

DeviantArt also has a shop where you can sell your item.  You can use their print service to make money while they handle the fulfilling and shipping of your orders.

The uploads are unlimited and you can dynamically present your artwork with the slideshow feature as well as get feedback from others on your uploads.  This service also has a feature where you can track your page views and stats. Obviously DeviantArt has a huge following, but this will mean you are a small fish in a very, very large pond of both amateurs and professionals, plus it’s exactly the place to gain new clients.

Host My Portfolio

Host My Portfolio is another free service.  With the ability have unlimited projects complete with 50 image uploads you also receive your own personal domain name to make the presence more targeted toward you and your business.

As with the other services, you don’t need any web experience to create your portfolio.  You can create and attach your profile information to share with your prospective clients.  You can share your portfolio or make it private or a little of both.

Flickr

The always expanding Flickr is not always a first choice for freelancers, but the benefits are quite large. Flickr offers both free and paid accounts, with limitations on uploads being one of the main decisions you will need to make. With groups, streams and sets it’s very easy to define sections for your account and provide direct access to particular creative work based on the client you may need to pass a link to.

Because of the size of  Flickr and an extensive API it’s a really good choice for those that may have a basic self hosted website because you can dynamically draw in sets, or streams etc in to your site pages quite easily thanks to WordPress plugins, Jquery scripts etc and even free flash based services. Most people think of Flickr as just a photography site, however browsing around you will find that most freelancers do use the service to some degree to help promote their portfolio of work whether it’s screen shots of websites and themes, through to photography and images / graphics.

Me.com

For Apple computer users they have the ability to sign-up for a Me.com account (free for 60 days!) and using programs such as iWeb you can immediately and very effectively create a smart portfolio full of your images direct to your account from your computer, without the need to know html and css. They even offer simple uploading of images (could be graphics, photos or screen shots) to create some really rather nice online portfolios you can then share with contacts. Again this is not a “standard” portfolio site, but really does offer new freelancers a cheap and easy way to get an online presence very quickly.

FolioLink

FolioLink offers a complete paid solution that offers elegant HTML and Flash based portfolio website solutions. Not only do they offer the website solution, but  your Image Archive is an online destination with 1000s of images and /or videos where your visitors and clients can search, proof, select, save, order and download content in public and restricted areas that you manage. Because this solution is a paid service you will need to seriously consider the benefits of their system compared to the pricing, however if you are looking to sell your work, deal with proofing with clients and an online portfolio this could well be a good decision – FolioLink do offer a free 7 Day Trial – although that may not be quite long enough to be able to test out the full system.

Squarespace

A relative newcomer to the online portfolio service market – Squarespace seems to of done it’s homework when it comes to freelancers. Their system runs on templates, all professionally created with many options for customization regardless of your skill levels. Their photo galleries are quite stunning and certainly the entire system is clearly built on a professional appearance and ease of use.

Squarespace offer many tools and widgets to get you up and running and stay running with social integration, a blog, form building and stats it really is quite an impressive solution and definitely one of the best out there. They offer a free 14 Day trial, and plans start from $8 and run all the way up to $50 for the “community” solution, however I would presume that the “pro” or “Advanced” packages would be most suitable to freelancers.

And your solutions are….?

Do you have a service or solution that you are using that you feel we should of included? We would love to hear from you. Drop a comment below and share your knowledge with us all – we’ll love you forever.

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