The site that has four jobs

What the site has to do

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.

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.

The structure that works

In order, on one page:

1. Six to eight pieces of work, images first. Largest first. No preamble.
2. 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.”
3. The case studies, under or behind the work.
4. 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.
5. 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.”

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.

Say the budget thing

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.

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.

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.

Free ways to have a site

You do not need to pay for hosting, and for most people you should not pay for a custom build.

• 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.
• 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.
• WordPress.com free tier or Notion as a public page: both ugly-ish but functional, both zero cost, both fine as a stopgap.
• Cargo and Framer have free tiers with a platform subdomain and reasonable defaults for image-heavy work.

The 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.

The pages people build that do not pay

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.

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.

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.

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.

One technical thing worth doing

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.

The limitation

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.

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.