8 Tools for Creating An Online Portfolio

Prior to graduating college, it is necessary to begin building your personal brand to be able to showcase your skills, experience, accomplishments and interests for future employers.

As of June 2013, there were 11.8 million unemployed people within the United States. Many of them are your competition when it comes to finding a fulfilling job in your field and starting your career, however it is possible to have a leg up over many other applicants.

Many employers are looking for candidates with an active presence online as part of their overall qualifications.

Yet, many people don’t have an online portfolio of their own to help market themselves to potential employers.

There are both paid and free versions of professional portfolios to choose from depending on your budget, but either way, it is possible for any graduate, job seeker, employee or entrepreneur to make a long lasting impression online to outshine the competition.

Here are eight tools to build an outstanding professional portfolio online:

1. LinkedIn – LinkedIn has become a powerhouse for the professional trying to highlight their career and education through texts and visuals. It’s arguably one of the most important tools for developing your career today.

Your resume is an important means of summarizing your career related to the job you're applying for, while LinkedIn is a timeline of everything you've ever accomplished professionally. Even now by writing this article, I'm contributing more material to my personal professional portfolio right here on LinkedIn.

With the recent addition of visuals, videos, articles and files, there’s no reason why your LinkedIn shouldn't contain content from your time as a student, internships you've completed, jobs you've worked at throughout your career and more.

LinkedIn is becoming more important to the job search for both candidates and employers alike, not to mention that it is completely free.

If you're looking for an example of a fully utilized LinkedIn profile then look to the following examples: Dave Kerpen, Lewis Howes or Donna Serdula.

2. Vizualize.me – Visuals are an important way of conveying value to potential employers, since they resonate better than text alone, which is why a tool like Vizualize.me is an effective means of sharing your professional background.

Once connected to your LinkedIn profile or after you sign up, Vizualize.me will pull together your information into a beautiful visualization of your career.

The tool is easily customizable with different themes and styles to portray your professional accomplishment appropriately in timelines, charts and other types of visualizations.

3. Vizify - Another tool to visualize your skills and experience powered by your resume and social media is Vizify. Connect either your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or all of these services to begin generating a profile for your own personal website powered by your own data for free.

It aggregates your best social media content, which helps to keep your bio as up to date as possible, while allowing for customization of the layout and content highlighted.

[Note: I didn't realize until now, but Vizify was acquired by Yahoo in March. The tool was active at the time I wrote this post, but is no longer available unfortunately. Sorry about that!]

4. Weebly – Building your own website to highlight your skills can be difficult and time consuming, which is why Weebly is a easy to use platform that allows professionals of all levels to create a mobile friendly website quickly and easily.

With free and paid features, start by selecting from their database of pre-designed themes and then customize your theme to the look and feel that fits best.

Weebly offers many of the benefits of having your own website, without the hassle of hosting it yourself. Here’s a step-by-step guide for building your own Weebly portfolio.

5. About.me – This tool is a simple way to build a beautiful and personal landing page about yourself online. About.me allows for a large image of yourself as the background and a brief text bio about your professional and personal endeavors.

The landing page also features link and updates from your social media profiles and other web properties you’re looking to share. Think of About.me as your personal homepage on the web.

6. WordPress – WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system that hosts many of the top websites across the web but can also be used by individuals to showcase their portfolio or personal blog.

The platform has extensive features and plugins for users both paid and free. Many of the free themes offered can be use for portfolios, especially with the wide range of examples to pull inspiration from.

Here is a list of fifteen themes and examples of WordPress portfolios to get suggestions from.

7. Wix – Another tool for creating a web portfolio for little to no cost, Wix is the code free way to customize a website to your needs.

Using one of the 100’s of HTML5 website templates, build a portfolio to highlight your professional accomplishments with the user-friendly drag and drop editor, as well as the many apps that can be added throughout your website to build a better experience for visitors.

Check out some examples of online portfolios designed using Wix.

8. PortfolioBox – To build an absolutely stunning and unique portfolio that helps streamline the design, hosting and marketing of your work online, look to PortfolioBox.

This portfolio design platform is most often used by photographers, designers and artists but can certainly be utilized by business professionals as well to create a unique website by choosing from thousands of sharp themes, all optimized for viewing on tablets and smartphones.

A business professional must merely be aware of how they choose to display their past experience to ensure it accurately reflects their skillset using this platform.

A version of this blog appeared on Graziado Voice.

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Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, speaker and a freelance writer helping businesses more effectively tell their story. He’s also a contributing columnist for Forbes, the Huffington Post, Mashable, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, the Next Web and others. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

[Header image courtesy of Radium.]

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