As a personal branding tool, you can impress recruiters by creating your own online portfolio. For a designer is a mantra to present work online in such a competitive industry. Every online tool you use in order to get your name out there will pay off in job seeking process.
The best way to get in front of the potential clients and employees is to set up a portfolio website using a functional WordPress theme, where you’ll be able to showcase all of your works.
Before creating an online portfolio you will most likely face the question: ‘Should I choose a hosting service or should I go for self-hosted website?’ We are calling for a self-hosted site and here are the most common reasons why it’s recommended to select a self-hosting.
1. Choosing custom name of your domain
One of the most important advantages of having a self-hosted portfolio is that you get your custom unique domain name. It can be beneficial as a personal marketing tool in the process of building your online presence. Also, for recruiters, it looks professional and credible.
2. Advantages for SEO ranking
The self-hosted website allows you to optimize it for search engines, which include your own meta titles, changing permalinks and so on. Good ranking and a hosted site with your own domain tend to create more faith and authority of your portfolio.
3. Full control over your website
Just a few clicks and you can change content, samples of the portfolio, create and manage new content and present the progress of your work. If you go for CMS system WordPress.org and invest to hosting service, it gives you access to hundreds of plugins which may help you to tune up the portfolio. Here is a good read about CMS.
Flexibility and full customization are the main benefits of the investment. Don’t let your portfolio be held back by functionality restrictions of free hostings.
4. Create a blog as a personal marketing tactic
There are several benefits coming hand by hand with blogging. Every time you publish a new post, it means one more indexed page, which increases the opportunity to show up in search engines and drives a new organic traffic to your website. It’s also a sign for search engines that your website is being updated which, as we know, affects ranking position.
Creating a unique content also may help you to build your online presence by social media. People can share on social networks Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest which helps to approach a new undiscovered audience that might be interested in your portfolio.
Creating a blog post also pay off in the future. Imagine you spend 2 hours by writing a post. Share it on social media, reach people via RSS feed. You get a number of views and share on the day it was published, then some more views and share the other day and on the third day, nobody cares. That’s not true! Once you publish a post, it’s there, it’s ranking in search engines which means people can reach you in future also and drive new traffic. The effort you put now can turn into hundreds of visitors in the future.
If the content you’re creating help your target group, it turns you into authority, a reliable source of information. Such a powerful tool for your personal marketing.
5. Set-up a Live Chat
Not only e-commerce websites found out a potential of live chat for the business. The ability to provide the convenient answers that the potential clients want, also adds significant benefit and raises your chances to be hired. Once the particular person is engaged with you, it creates a perfect position to negotiate and convince the person to make a final action.
6. Very own personal e-mail address
Another feature creating an impression of professionalism is your own personal e-mail address. Usually, self-hosted plans include mailbox within the hosting. You can easily manage emails, organize folders, spam filters and so on.
7. Tons of features and applications
Free platforms don’t provide some of the extra features such as automatic daily backups, multi-site capabilities, FTP access, custom error pages, one-click installs of a number of high-quality applications, and much more.
8. Improving your skills
By customizing self-hosted website you’ll enrich your computer knowledge. To install CMS system and design the layout according to your desired appearance, you’ll probably need to study few tutorials and guides to help you along the way. If you build the website by yourself, you may most likely save costs for outsourcing the maintenance.
9. Advertising
Hosting your own website makes you a boss of ads you include and place on your website. Some hosting services still include ads by default, which often doesn’t create any profit to you as a website owner. With a self-hosted website, you have absolute control over all ads and the revenue goes directly to your pocket.
10. Enough storage which can be upgraded
Free hosting service may more likely apply limitations on your account, which can be if you’re hosting a lot of videos and content of larger size, quite a tricky disadvantage. Hosting services come with plans you can adjust or upgrade according to your needs.
The major benefit overall still remain the control over everything on your website and ability to customize it without any design restrictions whenever you want.
