How to Make a Portfolio That Will Bring You Clients

If you’re taking advantage of a few quiet months, creating — or perhaps revisiting — an online portfolio might be a good use of your time. In this video, photographer Evan Ranft has some great suggestions on how to put one together.

The first half of Ranft’s video focuses on how to create a portfolio website using Squarespace, but there are some excellent alternatives out there, such as Zenfolio, Format, Pixeset, Pixpa, and no doubt, countless others. Squarespace evidently has the largest advertising budget, but many of the other platforms have equally good backends and sometimes contain features that are missing from Squarespace, such as fully integrated print ordering. If you plan to shoot weddings, engagements, newborns, families, and suchlike, you may wish to choose something that incorporates client galleries to give your image delivery a truly professional touch.

The second part of Ranft’s video runs through more general advice on creating the portfolio, and, rather importantly, keeping it fresh. Good photographers revisit their portfolios regularly, and like Ranft, you might be surprised to find how your taste in images changes over time, prompting you to tweak edits on photographs that you once thought looked great.

If you have further tips, be sure to leave them in the comments below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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