Ben writes in from the Phillipines,
“My biggest problem in freelancing (mine is web development) is not having enough ”good“ portfolio to show prospective clients. Do i really need to have one? I want to start all over again as a freelancer. Do I need to have portfolio pieces before I can start making my freelancing as a real business?”
I remember when I first started out as a freelancer, I knew I had to have a portfolio on my site. Why? Well… everyone else had one — that’s why.
So I did what most of us end up doing: I grabbed screenshots of a few sites I had worked out, and laid them out in a nice little table and stuck it front and center on my shiny new sales website.
It can’t hurt to show that you’ve been hired and produced something in the past. But the way we do demonstrate the fact that we’re capable of Getting Stuff Done could be done a lot better. On top of this, it makes sense to try to figure out why clients might care about a portfolio, and to use that to our advantage.
So here’s a bit about why clients care about portfolios, and what that means to you.