It's not at all difficult to build a decent design portfolio. But if your business depends on how you choose to showcase your work, "decent" usually won't cut it.
A nice painting with the caption "Autumn Colors" might be adequate in some cases. But more often than not a photograph, a work of art, a video, or a product requires more explanation. Merging text with images is where things get difficult.
Nor, do you want a portfolio that looks like every other website portfolio. The images may be different, but the overall sameness can be a recipe for boredom. Since users tend to scan, the look and style of your portfolio has to grab their attention. They need to study your work rather than scan through it.
That's where having the best possible portfolio themes and tools comes in. They don't just help you build, they inspire your creativity –just as these 8 will.
1. Porto – Ultimate WordPress + eCommerce Theme
Porto is a super-fast, Bootstrap 4-based, 100% mobile-ready multipurpose WordPress theme that not only offers you a better choice for your website design projects, but for your portfolio-creating activities as well. Porto's authors have consistently followed the latest design trends and adhered to the best coding practices – and it shows.
Flexibility is highly important to web designers. Unless a portfolio's design is extremely simple and straightforward, they often find that the themes or tools they're using place too many constraints on what they're trying to accomplish. Porto is extremely flexible, and its speed optimization wizard helps you optimize your site for speed step-by-step.
Read down its list of features and you'll find a whole host of demos including extremely powerful eCommerce demos and breadcrumb, slider, skin, and grid options, and more.
There's also an excellent selection of portfolio options including six different ways to display your portfolios. Porto is retina and WooCommerce ready, is equipped with Visual Composer and Revolution Slider and is compatible with tons of plugins.
2. BeTheme
BeTheme's library of customizable pre-built websites, the largest on the market, just keeps growing. The number now exceeds 350 of these professionally designed and crafted web-building tools. BeTheme has long been noted for the flexibility it offers web designers, and with the release of each new pre-built website it is even more so.
Every feature, functionality, and design option you're ever likely to need to put in place an award-winning portfolio is there t0o, including the popular drag-and-drop Muffin Builder, a powerful Admin Panel, and shortcodes, fonts, grid options, and color schemes galore.
This ThemeForest top 5 best seller is naturally responsive, the support is great, and with BeTheme it's possible to build a complex website in as little as 4 hours — and to create a beautifully-designed portfolio in even less time.
3. Kalium
You can build any type of website you want with Kalium and do so with comparative ease. Its WPBakery Page Builder, often described as the world's best of its kind, allows you to build pages in minutes. Kalium's one-click installer lets you clone all the content in any of its demo sites to get a project off to a quick start, and there's a host of design elements, options, and 100+ shortcodes plus special effects to help you along.
What about portfolios? For starters, Kalium offers over 30 different portfolio layouts, nicely arranged in seven main types. Within each type you'll find the sub-options needed to align images and create and adjust spacing and text. There are plenty of shop and blog layouts too, and Kalium is responsive, comes in 16 languages, and no coding is required.
4. Studio 8
Studio 8 is a modern, elegant WordPress theme that will help you introduce you and showcase your work to your site visitors in a totally professional way. This awesomely designed, flexible, and fully responsive theme caters to agencies, web designers, artists, and other professionals.
It helps them create eye-catching websites and portfolios designed to give them an edge over their competition.
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by SitePoint Team via SitePoint
