{"course":{"slug":"independent-creative","title":"Working for Yourself","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative","level":"intermediate","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"the-one-page-site","title":"The site that has four jobs","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/the-one-page-site","position":15,"of":84,"minutes":9,"answer":"A portfolio site converts attention that came from elsewhere rather than generating it, so it should be built in a weekend around four jobs (show the work, say what you do and for whom.","keyIdea":"A portfolio site converts attention that came from elsewhere rather than generating it, so it should be built in a weekend around four jobs (show the work, say what you do and for whom, and make starting a conversation obvious) with a domain you own as the only thing worth paying for."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## What the site has to do\n\nA portfolio site has exactly four jobs: show the work, say what you do, say who you do it for, and make it obvious how to start a conversation. Everything else on a typical creative website (the animated intro, the horizontal scroll, the custom cursor, the manifesto) is either neutral or actively costing you enquiries.\n\nThat sounds like a matter of taste. It is not entirely. There is a measurable mechanism underneath: a large share of your visitors arrive on a phone, on a mobile connection, often as the second thing they do after seeing your name somewhere. A site that takes eight seconds to become useful loses a meaningful fraction of them before it has said anything. Heavy autoplaying video backgrounds are the usual culprit, and they are the single most common self-inflicted wound on creative sites.\n\n## The structure that works\n\nIn order, on one page:\n\n1. **Six to eight pieces of work, images first.** Largest first. No preamble.\n2. **One sentence saying what you do and for whom.** \"I design packaging and labels for small food producers.\" Not \"multidisciplinary creative exploring the intersection of form and narrative.\"\n3. **The case studies**, under or behind the work.\n4. **Who you are**, four sentences and a face. The face matters more than the four sentences; people are deciding whether to trust a stranger with money.\n5. **How to start.** An email address as plain text, and what to include. \"Email me with what you're making, roughly when you need it, and a rough budget if you have one.\"\n\nThat last instruction does real work. Enquiries that arrive with a timeline and a budget can be answered in one reply. Enquiries that say \"hi, what are your rates?\" cost you three exchanges and convert far worse. Telling people what to send is free and changes the quality of your inbox within a month.\n\n## Say the budget thing\n\nThe most contested decision on a portfolio site is whether to publish prices. There is no universally correct answer, but the trade-off is knowable.\n\nPublishing a starting figure (\"projects typically start at ₹40,000\" or \"£1,500\") reduces the number of enquiries and raises the proportion that are serious. You lose the client who would have been talked up from a smaller budget; you stop spending Tuesdays on calls with people who wanted ₹5,000. If your problem is too many unqualified enquiries, publish. If your problem is silence, do not.\n\nWhat is almost always wrong is a full price list for creative work, because the price depends on scope that you have not heard yet. A starting figure is a filter; a price list is a commitment made before you know anything.\n\n## Free ways to have a site\n\nYou do not need to pay for hosting, and for most people you should not pay for a custom build.\n\n- **Carrd**: one page, free tier, good on a phone, ten minutes from nothing to live. The best default for a person who wants this done today.\n- **GitHub Pages**: free hosting of static files, with a custom domain if you want one. If you can write basic HTML, this is the version nobody can take away from you and nobody can raise the price of.\n- **WordPress.com free tier** or **Notion** as a public page: both ugly-ish but functional, both zero cost, both fine as a stopgap.\n- **Cargo** and **Framer** have free tiers with a platform subdomain and reasonable defaults for image-heavy work.\n\nThe one thing worth paying for is the **domain name**, at roughly ten to fifteen currency units a year. Not because it looks more professional, though it does slightly. Because it is the only part of your online presence that you own. Any platform can change its terms, its pricing or its existence; a domain you control can be repointed at whatever is next, and every link and business card you ever handed out still works.\n\n## The pages people build that do not pay\n\n**A blog you will not maintain.** An abandoned blog with three posts from two years ago is worse than no blog, because it dates the whole site.\n\n**A services list with twelve items.** Listing everything you are willing to do reads as a person who does nothing particularly well. Three is plenty.\n\n**A contact form instead of an address.** Forms lose messages, land in spam, and give the sender no copy of what they wrote. Plain text email works, and putting the address as real text rather than an image is fine; modern spam filtering handles the consequences better than obfuscation does.\n\n**Testimonials with no names.** \"Amazing to work with, J.K.\" carries no weight at all, because it costs nothing to write. A named quote from a named business is worth ten anonymous ones.\n\n## One technical thing worth doing\n\nCompress your images. Export at about 1600px on the long edge, quality around 80, and prefer WebP if your host supports it. A typical uncompressed portfolio page ships 15 to 30 MB of images; the same page done carefully ships 1 to 2 MB and looks identical on a phone screen. On a slow connection that is the difference between a visitor who sees your work and one who does not.\n\n> Figure: What a portfolio page ships to a phone. Bars (megabytes downloaded before the work appears): Full-size exports straight from the camera 22; Resized to 1600px long edge, quality 80 1.8; The same images again as WebP 1.1. Indistinguishable on a phone screen, and on a weak connection the difference is whether a visitor sees the work at all. An autoplaying video background costs more again, and it is the commonest self-inflicted wound on creative sites.\n\n## The limitation\n\nA portfolio site does not generate enquiries. It converts attention that came from somewhere else: a referral, a platform post, a cold email, a conversation at a wedding. People build the site first because it is the part that feels like progress and involves no rejection, and then wait.\n\nTreat the site as the place you send people, not the place people find you. It should take a weekend at most, and then you should stop touching it and go do the harder work of getting somebody to look at it."},"check":{"question":"A freelancer publishes 'projects typically start at £1,500' on her site. Enquiries drop by about half. Under what circumstance is this a good outcome rather than a bad one?","options":[{"text":"Always, because stating a starting figure signals confidence, and any enquiry lost to a published price was never going to convert at a fair rate anyway.","correct":false,"tempting":"Overstates it. The filter genuinely removes some clients who would have been talked up from a smaller budget, so it is a trade rather than a free gain."},{"text":"Never, because a starting figure anchors the client low and every subsequent quote gets measured against £1,500 rather than against the value of the work.","correct":false,"tempting":"Names a real anchoring risk, but a floor anchors upward from the bottom of the market; the actual cost of publishing is lost volume, not a lower ceiling."},{"text":"Only when the figure is high enough that it excludes the entire small-business segment, since the goal of publishing a price is to move upmarket.","correct":false,"tempting":"Assumes one purpose. The device is a filter at whatever level you set it; it is equally valid for a person whose target clients are small."},{"text":"When her problem was too many unqualified enquiries eating her week, rather than too few enquiries arriving at all.","correct":true}]},"prev":{"slug":"mockups-and-honesty","title":"Mockups, and where they start lying","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/mockups-and-honesty"},"next":{"slug":"platforms-and-their-economics","title":"Five platforms, five different currencies","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/platforms-and-their-economics"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'The site that has four jobs', in Working for Yourself. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/the-one-page-site (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"The site that has four jobs","courseTitle":"Working for Yourself","module":{"index":2,"slug":"work-you-can-show","title":"Work you can show"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"A portfolio site converts attention that came from elsewhere rather than generating it, so it should be built in a weekend around four jobs (show the work, say what you do and for whom, and make starting a conversation obvious) with a domain you own as the only thing worth paying for.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"type":"bars","unit":"megabytes downloaded before the work appears","title":"What a portfolio page ships to a phone","series":[{"label":"Full-size exports straight from the camera","value":22},{"label":"Resized to 1600px long edge, quality 80","value":1.8,"highlight":true},{"label":"The same images again as WebP","value":1.1,"highlight":true}],"caption":"Indistinguishable on a phone screen, and on a weak connection the difference is whether a visitor sees the work at all. An autoplaying video background costs more again, and it is the commonest self-inflicted wound on creative sites."},"alt":"Figure: What a portfolio page ships to a phone. Bars (megabytes downloaded before the work appears): Full-size exports straight from the camera 22; Resized to 1600px long edge, quality 80 1.8; The same images again as WebP 1.1. Indistinguishable on a phone screen, and on a weak connection the difference is whether a visitor sees the work at all. An autoplaying video background costs more again, and it is the commonest self-inflicted wound on creative sites."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"what-the-site-has-to-do","runs":[{"text":"What the site has to do"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A portfolio site has exactly four jobs: show the work, say what you do, say who you do it for, and make it obvious how to start a conversation. Everything else on a typical creative website (the animated intro, the horizontal scroll, the custom cursor, the manifesto) is either neutral or actively costing you enquiries."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That sounds like a matter of taste. It is not entirely. There is a measurable mechanism underneath: a large share of your visitors arrive on a phone, on a mobile connection, often as the second thing they do after seeing your name somewhere. A site that takes eight seconds to become useful loses a meaningful fraction of them before it has said anything. Heavy autoplaying video backgrounds are the usual culprit, and they are the single most common self-inflicted wound on creative sites."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-structure-that-works","runs":[{"text":"The structure that works"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"In order, on one page:"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Six to eight pieces of work, images first.","b":true},{"text":" Largest first. No preamble."}],[{"text":"One sentence saying what you do and for whom.","b":true},{"text":" “I design packaging and labels for small food producers.” Not “multidisciplinary creative exploring the intersection of form and narrative.”"}],[{"text":"The case studies","b":true},{"text":", under or behind the work."}],[{"text":"Who you are","b":true},{"text":", four sentences and a face. The face matters more than the four sentences; people are deciding whether to trust a stranger with money."}],[{"text":"How to start.","b":true},{"text":" An email address as plain text, and what to include. “Email me with what you’re making, roughly when you need it, and a rough budget if you have one.”"}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That last instruction does real work. Enquiries that arrive with a timeline and a budget can be answered in one reply. Enquiries that say “hi, what are your rates?” cost you three exchanges and convert far worse. Telling people what to send is free and changes the quality of your inbox within a month."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"say-the-budget-thing","runs":[{"text":"Say the budget thing"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The most contested decision on a portfolio site is whether to publish prices. There is no universally correct answer, but the trade-off is knowable."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Publishing a starting figure (“projects typically start at ₹40,000” or “£1,500”) reduces the number of enquiries and raises the proportion that are serious. You lose the client who would have been talked up from a smaller budget; you stop spending Tuesdays on calls with people who wanted ₹5,000. If your problem is too many unqualified enquiries, publish. If your problem is silence, do not."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"What is almost always wrong is a full price list for creative work, because the price depends on scope that you have not heard yet. A starting figure is a filter; a price list is a commitment made before you know anything."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"free-ways-to-have-a-site","runs":[{"text":"Free ways to have a site"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You do not need to pay for hosting, and for most people you should not pay for a custom build."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Carrd","b":true},{"text":": one page, free tier, good on a phone, ten minutes from nothing to live. The best default for a person who wants this done today."}],[{"text":"GitHub Pages","b":true},{"text":": free hosting of static files, with a custom domain if you want one. If you can write basic HTML, this is the version nobody can take away from you and nobody can raise the price of."}],[{"text":"WordPress.com free tier","b":true},{"text":" or "},{"text":"Notion","b":true},{"text":" as a public page: both ugly-ish but functional, both zero cost, both fine as a stopgap."}],[{"text":"Cargo","b":true},{"text":" and "},{"text":"Framer","b":true},{"text":" have free tiers with a platform subdomain and reasonable defaults for image-heavy work."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The one thing worth paying for is the "},{"text":"domain name","b":true},{"text":", at roughly ten to fifteen currency units a year. Not because it looks more professional, though it does slightly. Because it is the only part of your online presence that you own. Any platform can change its terms, its pricing or its existence; a domain you control can be repointed at whatever is next, and every link and business card you ever handed out still works."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-pages-people-build-that-do-not-pay","runs":[{"text":"The pages people build that do not pay"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A blog you will not maintain.","b":true},{"text":" An abandoned blog with three posts from two years ago is worse than no blog, because it dates the whole site."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A services list with twelve items.","b":true},{"text":" Listing everything you are willing to do reads as a person who does nothing particularly well. Three is plenty."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A contact form instead of an address.","b":true},{"text":" Forms lose messages, land in spam, and give the sender no copy of what they wrote. Plain text email works, and putting the address as real text rather than an image is fine; modern spam filtering handles the consequences better than obfuscation does."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Testimonials with no names.","b":true},{"text":" “Amazing to work with, J.K.” carries no weight at all, because it costs nothing to write. A named quote from a named business is worth ten anonymous ones."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"one-technical-thing-worth-doing","runs":[{"text":"One technical thing worth doing"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Compress your images. Export at about 1600px on the long edge, quality around 80, and prefer WebP if your host supports it. A typical uncompressed portfolio page ships 15 to 30 MB of images; the same page done carefully ships 1 to 2 MB and looks identical on a phone screen. On a slow connection that is the difference between a visitor who sees your work and one who does not."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-limitation","runs":[{"text":"The limitation"}],"role":"limit"},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A portfolio site does not generate enquiries. It converts attention that came from somewhere else: a referral, a platform post, a cold email, a conversation at a wedding. People build the site first because it is the part that feels like progress and involves no rejection, and then wait."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Treat the site as the place you send people, not the place people find you. It should take a weekend at most, and then you should stop touching it and go do the harder work of getting somebody to look at it."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"A freelancer publishes ‘projects typically start at £1,500’ on her site. Enquiries drop by about half. Under what circumstance is this a good outcome rather than a bad one?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Always, because stating a starting figure signals confidence, and any enquiry lost to a published price was never going to convert at a fair rate anyway."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Overstates it. The filter genuinely removes some clients who would have been talked up from a smaller budget, so it is a trade rather than a free gain."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Never, because a starting figure anchors the client low and every subsequent quote gets measured against £1,500 rather than against the value of the work."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Names a real anchoring risk, but a floor anchors upward from the bottom of the market; the actual cost of publishing is lost volume, not a lower ceiling."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Only when the figure is high enough that it excludes the entire small-business segment, since the goal of publishing a price is to move upmarket."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Assumes one purpose. The device is a filter at whatever level you set it; it is equally valid for a person whose target clients are small."}]},{"text":[{"text":"When her problem was too many unqualified enquiries eating her week, rather than too few enquiries arriving at all."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null}],"order":[2,3,0,1],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"mockups-and-honesty","title":"Mockups, and where they start lying","minutes":9},"next":{"slug":"platforms-and-their-economics","title":"Five platforms, five different currencies","minutes":9}}}