The Do’s and Don’t of Building your Own Artist e-Portfolio – Part I

Available Platforms to Create your Own Online Portfolio

When it comes to designing and building a website there are hundreds of platforms that can be used, but if you are not a programmer or web designer by trade it can get complicated very fast.

Building a website from scratch is certainly not easy not mentioning time consuming and requires a lot of programing knowledge. PHP, XML, XHTML, HTML, Perl and other language programing skills are required in most cases and learning them just to be able to build your portfolio take years aside from the fact it makes no sense.

Just as you take your time to paint your next masterpiece a web designer can take from 2 weeks up to 6 months to build your website, that’s why many respected web designers (myself included) charge a good amount of money for this task, but as an artist unless you’re a professional with a good stable income and can spare a couple thousand dollars you’ll feel this to be quite impossible to achieve as well. But then you face the problem that many artists and photographers face, how do you build your own website the right way without spending years learning to code or thousands of $$$? That’s where open source platforms come handy and very convenient. There is almost no need for complicated programing and coding knowledge and basically anyone can get a website in a matter of hours.

Some of the most known free or open source platforms used to build online portfolios are:

• Flash (not open source but free websites are available)
• Blogger
• WordPress

These platforms have pros and cons, and I’m going to briefly explain why you would want to use some and not others.

Flash

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According to the Wikipedia: Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to Web pages.
It is very much used in the advertising and game industry, but when it comes to web design aside from creating a cool presentation it offers nothing more and it could potentially hurt your business in the long run and here is why. Websites or portfolios built using Flash in its entirety can get heavy, slow to download and rank poorly on search engines as the text (keywords) search engines like google need to identify your website are 90% of the time embedded into the images. Also Flash websites have a limited audience as many phones, like the iPhone, tablets like the now uber popular iPad and older browsers don’t support Flash, and there is nothing that would hurt your business as an artist more than not having a website that can  literally be seen worldwide throughout any platform which is basically the scope of having a website right? to reach the most possible audience. When it comes down to cost, unless you know how to design and customize using flash, some of the templates can get pretty expensive, although there are free templates available as well as tools to visually design your website from scratch, just prepare yourself to spend a good amount of hours building your portfolio.

Blogger

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Although many know Blogger as the free Google blog platform, Blogger can also be used to create simple portfolios, although some coding knowledge is required. The disadvantage of having a Blogger blog or portfolio is not only the requirement of coding knowledge but the fact that it’s hosted on google servers. You can certainly transfer blogger to your server, and have a unique domain name for your website rather than a subdomain from blogger.com but unless you know the how to code this can become quite cumbersome and frustrating for some. In terms of cost, there are widely available free and paid templates for blogger, and with a little bit of CSS knowledge you can customize your own.

WordPress

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The best platform I’ve found that can accomplish everything and anything your imagination can come up with and the most used around the web is WordPress. WordPress is an open source blog platform (free) with literally endless possibilities. It can be used to create a simple blog or journal, a portfolio, a multi user magazine or newspaper all the way to an e-commerce. It uses PlugIns which are basically pieces of code packed and ready to install in just a few very simple steps that boost your site to the next level and there are thousands of them available both free and paid ones. There is no need for complicated coding knowledge and help is available around the corner. The platform can be installed on any server that runs PHP5 and the instructions are quite simple to follow. Templates for the presentation of your blog or portfolio are available for free although you can get some pretty ones for not too much money. When it comes to customization you can hire a web designer to make your online presence all about you and your company, (prices for custom designs range between $50 all the way to $1500 and more depending on your needs) but if you have some CSS knowledge you can tackle that task on your own. This blog as well as my Daily Paintings website were created using WordPress.

I’ve used over the years many platforms and built many websites for my clients from scratch, code by code, but if I have to give my recommendation I would recommend WordPress with my eyes closed as anyone can install and create a portfolio using this platform in a matter of hours. So if you’re facing the decision of creating your blog, portfolio or e-commerce give WordPress a try.

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