What is Business Card?

Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. A business card typically includes the giver’s name, company affiliation (usually with a logo) and contact information such as street addresses, telephone number(s), fax number, e-mail addresses and website. It can also include telex, bank account and tax code. Traditionally many cards were simple black text on white stock; today a professional business card will sometimes include one or more aspects of striking visual design.

Business card has a vital role in your business no matter what type of business and size. In order to maintain the stream and constant communication with your clients you should have your own business card that should reflect how your business run and serve.

This post will not only confer the usual business card that we see and received from our friends and clients. We are going to showcase one of the most advance features of a business card today. This is all about QR Code.

What is QR Code?

A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and large storage capacity compared to traditional UPC barcodes. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be made up of four standardized kinds (“modes”) of data (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, Kanji), or by supported extensions virtually any kind of data.

Created by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994to track vehicles during the manufacturing process, the QR code is one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. It was designed to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

So now that you know about QR code we will proceed in showcasing some of the best business card design that has QR code printed. Consider also business card printing companies who accommodate printing of business card with QR codes.

Adding QR code as one of the features of your business card will attract prospect client also. They will think that you are also up to date of what is the latest trend today. After reading and watching all our featured business card with QR code we are sure that you will have your own idea now how to design and soon you are going to print it and distribute to your clients and even to your circle of friends.

15 Best Business Card with QR code printed

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BY: Kamal El Adouti Aknioui

BY: Toby Harriman

BY: Samora Reid

BY: Ivan Dilberovic

BY: Sasha Roper

BY: Danilo Freitas Souza

BY: Erik Wiegers

BY: Jon Montenegro

BY: Thorsten Röver

BY: Grafikarna

BY: Daniel Marsh

BY: Robert McElaney

BY: Jonathan Rogers

BY: James Meekins

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It is all too easy in the digital age that we live in to write off many traditional business and marketing techniques like direct mail, face to face interactions, and business cards. Digital marketing and e-commerce have changed the playing field but have not changed the rules. Business cards are a great way to establish relationships and remind potential clients of your services in the future. Below are many ways to make your business card stand out in the 21st century.

credit: Lucid-Dreams

1) Use new technology like QR codes

Credit: Global X

Almost everyone has a smartphone these days. This creates a unique opportunity when it comes to making a unique business card. Leave some space on the back of the business card in the corner for a QR code (a scannable image that gives phone instructions). For example, you could place a QR code on your card that would redirect when scanned to the company website, a promotional youtube video, or even a coupon or discount. This integration of print and digital makes it possible to track business card success.

2) Unique and sleek textures stimulate memory

Credit: yuichirock

Business cards are useful but can often get lost in the crowd with dozens of other business cards competing for valuable wallet space. Find a unique texture that will make your card stand out from the rest and is pleasing to the touch. This will also help add an additional layer other than appearance to your card to help make it more memorable down the line.

3) Bump share and digital image storage

One problem with print business cards is that they are so easy to lose or just throw away. How many times have you done some house cleaning with your wallet or purse and thrown away receipts and business cards? There are many different apps on android and iPhone, like bump share technology, that allow you to either store digital business cards, or take pictures of a physical business card and save them in your phone. Business cards don’t get thrown out as much when you don’t have to physically keep up with them.

4) Include links to your social media

Credit: richardbouchez

In the olden days a business card needed a few key pieces of information; a phone number, an address, and an email address. Today, business cards need to include social media information like a linkedin account, a website, twitter accounts (if you use twitter) and other social networks that are related to your niche. This also shows potential customers that you are actively involved in more ways than one with the industry.

There are many traditional tips that still are relevant today with business cards. As always make sure that your design and message are consistent with both your personal branding and branding of the company. A great design will always be one way to “wow” potential customers and give them a reason to remember you.

This article was written by PrintExpress.co.uk; a London based printers specializing in business cards, magazines, brochures and a range of other bespoke printing types for professionals.

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A rack card is a document used for commercial advertising, frequently in convenience stores, hotels, landmarks, restaurants, rest areas and other locations that enjoy significant foot traffic. Rack cards are typically 4 by 9 inches in size and sport high-impact graphic design.

Rack Cards are proven to be one of the most effective yet low cost marketing tools.  Promote your business to vacationers, tourists, travelers – or even those customers right in your own backyard.

Aside from business card, flyers and brochure you might also give a try to this method since there are already  lot of companies that do rack card printing. Before ensuing to print your rack cards for your business please review it and ask an advice from a marketing expert.

Here is a list of 12 Rack Cards design that will inspire you.

by scarletbeauty

by geedimensions

by S.R. Martin

by Tucker Brooks

by Douglas Barba

by Stephanie M. Bartsch

by Murphy Advertising

by Travis Patterson

by Chris Edington

by Oran Parker

by ricepicker

by Stephanie McGinn

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Lonely, stress, heart broken or just relaxing over your rooftop drinking beer and the only companion is the moon. The moon is the only thing you look and talk to when you have this kind of emotions and feelings, sometimes you tend to grab a camera and take a shot of it. most people becomes good in composing and creativity when they got drunk he-he-he that happens to me. my imagination keeps popping when i am alone and having a drink. it means photography are for people who get drunk also.

Moon comes with different shapes, shoot every shape and compile them into one image, this will make more powerful and interesting view of the moon if you upload and print. Therefore no boring and flat photo of the moon.

Here is a sample image that i am talking about: shoot every shape then use Photoshop to put them together into one file.

If you compare a single moon shot to the 1st image above which will most likely to attract attention?

Merging in Photoshop requires basic knowledge to do this style because the background is black so a simple erase tool will do the trick.

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As a web designer, you have probably thought out every page long and hard. You keep an eye on the latest trends, look for the best tools to make your life a little easier and make sure that you user base is happy. But despite this, you very well might be falling into the same trap as so many other in the business: forgetting to account for the visually impaired.

In the past, this was less of an issue. Those with serious disabilities that prevented them from seeing a screen commonly use a reader to browse the web, and so design means little as long as it is compatible with their device.

But with the increasing userbase of people over 50, and age where visual problems begin to increase, and the surge in people who wear corrective lenses and eyeglasses, you have to keep it in mind. All designs should be somewhat catered to those who have visual impairments, which in the US is in the tens of millions just in the 45 and up demographic alone.

There are a few simple ways you can incorporate this knowledge into your design without affecting the overall concept.

1. Keep Your Spacing In Mind

I have lost count of the amount of times I have come across websites with close borders that don’t allow for enlarged text. Even people with slightly blurred vision might use CTRL + in order to increase the font for easier reading. Which on some layouts may break the look and cause overlap in columns or grid boxes.

The best way to get around this is making the layout size enough to accommodate sizes from 10 to 16 point. Test it on each size upgrade to make sure it is at least clear. Even up to 14 is acceptable, if you are working with limited space.

2. Create Plenty Of Keyboard Shortcuts

Plenty of people use keyboards only due to their inability to see a mouse cursor. When this happens, they need keyboard shortcuts to navigate properly. No one likes to have to Tab their way over extensive content, so offer an easy and basic shortcut code list that allows them to use the arrow keys and a couple of extras to work their way through. A good example of this is Facebook, which has a complete shortcut system for visually impaired or disabled users.

3. Provide Plenty Of Color Contrast

One of the best things you can do is give good color contrast. Anything that is too close in shade or tone to your background is asking for trouble, even for users who don’t have vision problems. It can cause eye strain for healthy eyes, and be completely unreadable for those with poor eyesight.

For healthy users, you can just have subtle changes in order to make it easy to view. If this is a big part of your layout, you are welcome to keep it. But you will have to create a higher contrast version for the visually impaired, otherwise they will be unable to read it.

Luckily, you will find that high contrast web design has been trending heavily the last few years. Especially colors like back backgrounds with white text, so it shouldn’t be a hard guideline to stick to.

4. Don’t Forget The Colorblind

One kind of visual impairment that many people trivialize is colorblindness. It might seem like just a small problem, but many conditions severely effect the way webpages are viewed. If you use a myriad of colors, you could be making it impossible for that percentage of users to view your handiwork.

There are a number of sites that will let you test your web page to see what it looks like to people with different types of colorblindness. One of my personal favorites is ColorFilter, which also have a number of useful links to learn more.

5. Give Full Access To Your Mobile Version

Some visually impaired web users will use searches to find the mobile versions of sites. That is because the viewing potential of these versions are better, due to their higher contrast, larger text and simpler designs.

Instead of only offering mobile versions for phones, give full access on the web, as well. It is an easy way to provide a more user friendly version with very little work on your part.

Conclusion

It is important to incorporate elements to your web design that provide access to those with visual impairments and other disabilities or problems. Don’t make the mistake of leaving these guidelines out of your design.

Annie is a web design blogger for Direct Sight – check out the site for detailed guidelines on purchasing glasses online.

Image Credits: 1, 2.

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In today’s technology dominated time, almost everything has been revolutionized. Advance in technology has made our lives much easier. One good example is Google. Be it Google search or any other application offered by Google, today we can not really imagine our lives without these applications. Keeping up with its tradition of coming up with convenient and time saving applications, Google introduced Google Docs. Today almost every office, every business owner makes use of Google docs to make work easier and convenient.

Google Docs is a suite of products. Using Google Docs you can create various types of documents and work on these documents in real time with other people. Moreover, you can also store your documents and other files online. And the best thing is that it call can be done without paying a penny. That is, it is absolutely free. All you need to have is an internet connection. With that you can easily access your documents and files from any other computer anywhere in the world. In fact, there are certain things that can be done even without an internet connection. Read further and you will find out all the detailed information about Google docs.

Let us first talk about the document list. Google Docs lets you create documents, spreadsheets, other files, and collections. You can also upload files from your computer, manage them and store files and folders. You can also share your documents. The preview feature lets you see how your document looks like before you open them and share it with other people. You can also view images and videos that you have uploaded to your Documents list. It also lets you search for items by type, name and visibility setting.

One of the best things is that you can convert most of the file types to Google Docs format. With the format feature, you can add zing to your documents. There are options paint  format, margins, spacing, and fonts. You can also invite others to collaborate on a doc. You can also provide them with edit, comment or view access. It is also possible to collaborate online in real time and chat with others. You can check a document’s revision history with the help of the History feature. Moreover, you can get back to any other version you want anytime. You can download Google docs to RTF, PDF, HTML, Open office, Word or even Zip files. It also lets you translate a document to many languages. You can attach and email these documents as well.

With the help of Google docs, one can easily create, share, and edit documents online. Some of the things that should be kept in mind are- try to convert as many file types to Google docs format.

If you want to view many file types online including PDFs as well, you can do that using Google Docs Viewer. It also enables oyu to create a link using which others can view your document easily in any of the browsers. You can directly access the Google Docs Viewer by going to docs.google.com/viewer. What’s really good about this is that it supports more than 15 file types. Some of the file types are Microsoft Word (.Doc and .Docx), Microsoft Excel (.Xls and .Xlsx), Adobe pages (.Pages), Adobe Illustrator (.AI), Adobe Photoshop (.PSD). The great thing is that Google Docs Viewer is directly connected to Gmail. To check an attachment you received in Gmail, you can click the ‘View’ link. It will display the attached file in Google Docs Viewer.

Now let us talk about navigating the Google Docs viewer page. Whenever you upload a file to Google Docs and do not convert it to Google Docs format, then it will have a Google Docs Viewer page. This page can be accesses by clicking the file’s title in the document list. You can also access it by following a link that is shared with you. This page gives information like title of the file, the file owner, time when file was uploaded, and preview of the file. You can see the revision history of the file and change the sharing settings, that is, if you have owner or edit rights. The file can also be downloaded and printed by clicking on File menu and selecting ‘Download as’ option. You can also search the content.

It is time to move on to Spreadsheets. The spreadsheets can be imported and converted. You can use formatting and formula editing . By doing this you can calculate results and give the desired look to your data. It also lets you chat with other people who are making changes in the spreadsheet in real time. Charts and gadgets can be created. Moreover, you can embed a spreadsheet or individual sheets in your website.

When it comes to presentations, there is a whole lot of things that you can do with them. First of all, you can edit and share the presentations with friends and colleagues. It is also possible to import and convert existing presentations in .pptx and .pps file types. The presentations can also be downloaded as a PDF, a PPT and .txt file. The slides can be formatted and images and videos can be added to them.  You can also allow your presentations to be viewed in real time. You can also embed your presentations and publish them in a website. This will enable your presentations to be accessed by a wider audience. Flowcharts, diagrams etc can be drawn within a presentation. To create interesting presentations you can add animations, themes and slide transitions.

Similarly drawings can also be edited and shared with friends and colleagues. The drawings can be inserted in a document, spreadsheet and presentation.

Another interesting feature of Google Docs is that you can add viewers and editors. You can not only share your docs with people you want but also specify the level of access you want to provide. By default, the visibility option for doc is ‘Private’. Therefore, your doc can only be seen by the people with whom you are sharing the doc. Moreover, it is also possible and very simple to change the visibility option of your Docs. You just need to follow these simple steps. First of all, go the doc you want to share and open it, look for the ‘Share’ button in the upper right corner of the doc. A sharing setting window will appear. At the bottom of the window, and under ‘add people’ option, simply type the email address of the people you want to share your doc with. You can either add a mailing list or a single person.

There are plenty of things that you can do with these great Google docs. You can

• create, name and delete a document
• format a document
• upgrade a doc to the new version of Google docs
• change the font style
• use bookmarks in a doc, and a lot more things

Therefore, it goes without saying that you can make your task much simpler and well organized by using Google docs. It not only saves time and efforts but also lets you share things with anyone you want. So go ahead and make optimum use of Google docs and it’s plenty of wonderful features that will make you job so easy.

Adam Parker is working as an E-marketing Executive at HTMLFirm. HTMLFirm is specialized in providing PSD to HTML, PSD to WordPress, PSD to Magento Conversion services.

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Just the way you put your signature in a slam book, companies too leave a mark in market and is best achieved through a ‘Logo’. A simple design can become a brand identity if created and marketed in a proper way. A successful logo can bring recognition to the brand and help people identify the brand with respect and admiration. Designing such an effective logo needs lot of care, precaution, forethought and patience.

A logo can consist of a single design or a combination of many design objects. It can also flash a small caption or a couple of words usually placed below the logo design though there are few logos which have proved to be successful even without any caption.

Simple but effective design: Never try to overdo the logo designs. Keep them as simple as possible. Remove the extra weight and unnecessary elements in the design. At the same time, keep the logo design very effective. A simple sketch should be able to effectively convey the brand name and the product in a most relevant manner. Have you ever wondered a simple fruit like an apple, could do wonders for ‘i’ products, or a simple ‘Tick’ mark is able to carry a huge brand name like ‘Nike’?

Color palette :  Use color combinations carefully to suit your business and brand. It is usually not advisable to use a mixture of more than three colors in the design, unless the design is extremely promising; ‘Windows logo’ being the best example.

Caption: A caption, one liner, tag line, slogan whatever you call, Choose the apt one for your brand. It can be describing the product and services or simply signify confidence and trust. ‘Diamonds are forever’ of DeBeers, ‘I’m loving it’ of McDonalds, ‘Just do it’ of Nike, ‘Drive home a relationship’ of Hyundai Santro are classic examples. Try to avoid lengthy captions. Remember if you can’t find a good one liner, it is better not to have any! If you are not convinced, ask Puma!

Balance: make the right balance with the design, shape, color and caption. If your logo is an aggressive one, the colors should be bold and attractive. The Leaping Puma of Puma brand is best to explain this. Caption should also be supplementing the expression of the logo. ‘The ultimate driving machine’ – BMW!

Timeless designs: let your logo design not fade away or become irrelevant with time. Once created, the brand should grow along with the logo; the people who trust a brand name will always search or relate to that unique logo of yours knowingly or unknowingly in the market.

Let your logo be unique, special, permanent and a quality one. Remember creativity and innovation has no limits!

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Search engine optimization and search engine marketing play a very crucial role in the promotion and success of an online portal. However, it takes sincere efforts, right approach and accurate strategies to make a niche for yourself in a hyper competitive world. This is where the role and importance of web analytic tools comes into play. Web analytic basically means the measurement, collection, analysis and reports on internet data. In other words, web analytics can be described as the study of the numbers of all the aspects of a site’s online activities. Search engines takes almost every aspect of a website into account while they rank it. Moreover, with time and change in technology, it is not just a website that is measured, but also things like social media activities that include Facebook activity, LinkedIn insights and a lot more.

A web analytics tool can help in analyzing market trends and to identify website visitors and users. Another advantage is that it can help you determine the behavior of website users, latest website trends and your visitors’ or users’ preferences in terms of site features.

If you have been around in the online world, you must have realized that it is imperative to test everything you do. You need to ensure whether things like squeeze pages, sales letters, blogs etc are working fine. The way to find this out is to track them. Web analytics help to measure site traffic as well as the site behavior.  In fact, a web analytic tool can help immensely in tracking visitors and their search behavior. Read further and you will find out how.

First of all, a web analytic tool helps to monitor your visitors and users. It helps you to find out how long visitors stay on your site, who they are and also their location. It helps you to find out the visitors’ clickstreams, keywords used by them, and how they landed on your website. You also get to know how many times a user or a visitor returned to your site and which pages were given preference. All these are important to improve the performance of a website.

It also gives you information like nationality and language of your visitors. It can also tell you about their city of origin, IP address and host used for access. Another important information it gives is- it helps you discover whether visitors were there to actually check out your site or did they get strayed. It also tells you how many visitors you get daily. Furthermore, it helps you to determine the bounce rate, that is, why visitors left your site without any action.

Another important benefit of a web tool is that it helps you to optimize your website in an effective manner. With a web tool, you get all the above mentioned information about your website. This helps you to optimize your website in a right manner. You get a clear idea as to what needs to be changed and what requires more attention on your site. It helps you determine which pages are viewed most and which ones get ignored. Thus you can work on improving those ignored pages.

With the help of a web analytics tool, you can also formulate a sales and e-marketing plan for your business. This ensures an effective plan as it is based on actual facts and not on probabilities. You get a very clear picture of what exactly does the market demands from you. You can track the most viewed items and can find out which products received excellent response. It also helps you to enhance various other programs that you may have already employed. These include PPC advertisement. It will make sure that you get more clients. You will also know how to monitor and keep your clients hooked to your site.

Some key information provided by a web analytics tool

• Time spent by a visitor on the site
• Keywords used by the visitor to arrive at the site.
• The IP address and country information from where the visits generate.
• The arrival pages and the exit pages.
• Identifying the week areas in web pages.
• Identifying lucrative online partners.

Hence it is clear that a web analytics tool is of much importance for proper functionality of a website. There are many analytics tools available in the market. Discussed below are the five important and useful web analytics tool.

1. Google analytics:

Google analytics is one of the most comprehensive  tracking system . It is also a very sophisticated one. And why not? It has to be so for it is Google. It is quite simple to use. You just need to grab the code, put it into your HTML above the closing body tag. It provides all the vital information like site usage, bounce rate, traffic sources, map overlay, content overview etc. It helps you comprehend how your visitors were able to find or arrive at your website. This can even narrow down into keyword level. You will know what are the keywords that visitors use in order to reach you page. Secondly, you would know whether your optimization efforts are paying or not. Moreover, you can also  find out which other pages need more optimization in order to get more traffic. Above everything else, Google Analytics can be used for free!

2. Yahoo analytics:

This is also a free tool. It is a part of Yahoo search marketing or Yahoo pay per click. It is also easy to set up. It is more than a reporting tool. It is a powerful and highly flexible data analysis tool. It helps you see individual click paths, time spent, actions taken, and other information about particular visits. This is not all. It also helps you to track up to 50 different online actions. Also, any link or page load can be tracked. It provides you individual visit information. Yahoo analytics lets you create new custom reports or edit existing reports with the metrics you need. You can also  organize it the way you like with the help of drag and drop Custom Report Wizard. Most of these reports allow you to quickly compare the time period you are viewing to another time period side-by-side. Another feature called the Paths to Conversion report gives you a list of all the paths that led to any of the 50 actions you can track on your site.

3. Piwik:

Piwik is another open source and downloadable real time web analytics software program. The best thing about this tool is that it gives you detailed reports on your website visitors, the keywords used by them and the language they speak. It also gives information on search engines and your popular pages.

4. Crazy Egg:

It has some really cool features. It not only helps you to track where your visitors are clicking, but it also lets you to see in various colors exactly where they click and how many are clicking.

5. Woopra: 

Woopra is a great web analytic tool that offers some amazing features like visitor tracking, live dashboard, visitor search, live chat, live map, custom events, custom visitor data, notifications, dynamic labels and many more.

HTMLFirm is professional PSD to HTML conversion company which converts your photoshop designs to high quality cross browser compatible, W3C validated and SEO semantic HTML/CSS markup. Check HTMLFirm.com for PSD to HTML, PSD to CSS/XHTML, PSD to WordPress.

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Creating a website has many steps, each one necessary in developing a functional and attractive hub for visitors. The main design is usually the biggest concern, taking up the most time.

But that doesn’t mean it is the only important element to ensuring you have the best, most professional site possible.

Usability testing is a must for any website. It is also the most grueling, detailed and all-together boring part of the entire process. That’s right: It is miserable. However, if you make the mistake of skipping it or doing it without the proper focus and dedication it deserves, it can lead to serious problems with your website.

Worse is when you perform usability tests, but don’t know the fundamentals. This could cause you to miss factors that were important and so make it necessary to perform the usability tests again. This wastes time and money, sometimes in large amounts that can set you back significantly.

Here are a couple of basics to keep in mind when you prepare to conduct your own usability tests.

Tip No. 1: Gather a Good Number of Test Subjects

There is a fine balance between too many testers and too few. Less than five is never enough, as it doesn’t offer enough variety to come to a true conclusion. It could very much be that you are just establishing a fact on the opinion of a few, which isn’t a good average.

Likewise, too many is unnecessary and can actually overthink your results. So those groups that suggest you have as many as you can afford don’t understand the statistics behind usability testing. Most projections state that five subjects will yield around an 85 percent accuracy rate.

Start with five to seven users and go from there. If you don’t feel you have adequately tested the site, you can find a few more to confirm the results.

Tip No. 2: Work With Your Researchers, but Don’t Go Over Their Heads

It is your job to let your research team know about the product service or site you have created. They have to have a real understanding in order to properly conduct testing, so your involvement will be appreciated.

But remember that the research team members are the professionals, and you called them in because they know what they are doing. Don’t try to control the testing, and instead let them do the job they were hired to do.

Tip No. 3: Take Advantage of Test Videos

You probably won’t have a lot to do with watching the videos from your usability tests. But having them is an invaluable resource worth investing in, and there is a reason that firms specializing in this service.

Allow your research team to take over the viewing, but insist on using these videos to get an accurate view of the emotional response of the subjects. Their expressions can tell you a lot.

Tip No. 4: Remember That You Want a User to Figure out the Interface

There are always horror stories passed around by exasperated researcher teams about designers who were too enthusiastic about getting involved. They end up hopping right into the process with the testing group and show them the ins and outs of the site.

While it is admirable that they want to be a part of the process, this eliminates the entire purpose of the testing in the first place. The point behind these measures is to watch as a user figures out the interface on his or her own, without a tutorial. It has to be friendly, engaging and simple for them.

So step back and let them get to it.

Tip No. 5: Establish a Baseline Set on User Behavior

You will have a target group that will serve as those to whom you will market your product. But to find out if you are on the right track with a product, you have to figure out who the average user will be. This fact can be best ascertained using a screener that includes behavior and lifestyle questions.

These include what products they have purchased in the past, how much time they spend online, familiarity of popular social media and networking sites like Facebook and YouTube, and whether or not they play games on a regular basis.

Conclusion

Usability testing is not a difficult part of developing a site or product. But it is a ridiculously long and tedious one. You want to do it right the first time, minimizing the time and money spent on the job.

These tips will act as a simple guideline to getting started. If you use them along with an experienced and knowledgeable research group, the tests should be successful.

Jennifer Moline writes for the PsPrint Blog and has been covering small-business and freelance news for a number of years. Follow PsPrint on Twitter and Facebook. PsPrint is discount printing company.

Image credit: algogenius’ photostream

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Before hiring someone, any client needs to see the real potential of the future employee and even some projects completed by him or her. This logical need is the base of what web designers name portfolio, it is the website where a freelancer or an agency are presenting the services provided, obviously added up with an exhibition of the best items created and a contact form. By visiting the portfolio, a client could form a correct opinion, based on existent evidences, no matter how persuasive the owner of it may be.

Many people consider that putting a portfolio online is the last thing that could be done, from now they will be waiting for customers to request their services. Unfortunately, the situation is very different; the launching of portfolio is only the beginning of a long time effort. Nowadays, the client has become more important than he was considered a few years ago and his satisfaction is considered an absolute priority of any service provider.

In order to have a successful portfolio, you have to create it according to some rules, nothing very complicated but quite useful, even before launching some tough decisions should be made. Here are the stages of creating and launching a good portfolio but the possibility of gaining clients is strictly related to the quality of items exposed. More exactly, a photographer may have the best portfolio ever created, but if his photos are just decent and have nothing to impress the on-lookers, there are few chances to be profitable.

1. Before effective launching

   a. Make a clear selection of your works

   

    

   Being photographer, logo designer, web designer or any other specialist, it is highly probable that you keep, in your computer, the files of the previous projects. The main constituent of a portfolio are these and before uploading, it is better to select the best ones and eventually, classify them

   b. Select a proper domain name and a good hosting
   
   

   The domain name is very important for both search engines and people. To be on the first page, for specific keywords, it is mandatory in order to be visited then eventually contacted and the domain name plays an important role in the hierarchy of the websites.

   A domain name that is related to the services offered has many chances of being put in the text box of a search engines, or else a strong branding campaign is required to make another name famous.

   The problem of hosting is obvious, anyone wants a website that will be visited regularly, from without any additional delays or other kind of issues.

   c. Design the layout/ buy a theme/ hire a designer
   
   

   Here comes one of the most difficult parts of this program. Depending on each one abilities, the website must be created, a web designer may design the layout himself but, to avoid any subjectivity, he could hire another designer to do it.

   Others could simply select the proper theme for their website, the Internet is full of market places where fabulous ones are sold. The manner of making the website is important but it’s not capital, what really matters is how attractive and useful it is for visitor

2. After launching

   a. Upload only the best items
   
   

   At this stage, the portfolio is online and ready to be accessed by potential clients. Under these circumstances, its owner must have selected the items to upload (the first stage) and now he is just uploading the best of the best.

   If the man/agency behind portfolio offers multiple services, the items exposed must be well classified, in this way the visitors aren’t disoriented.

   b. Create a “testimonials “page
   

   It isn’t a secret or a bad remark, but the common individual isn’t very qualified in judging the value of various online services and products, it could happen that a nice guy likes all the portfolios he is visiting but a more fastidious one won’t appreciate any work. A smart portfolio owner will create a special page, a “testimonials” one where previous clients may express their consideration. Using this pattern, the visitors understand that here is the portfolio of a reliable and serious expert; much more, anyone can contact the persons from “testimonial page” to verify the value of truth of the statements. This level of transparency surely satisfies even the most incredulous clients.

   c. (optional) Subjoin a blog
   

   Many people probably wonder why it is optional to create a blog. The advantages of having a blog near your previous items and contact page are huge as the possibility of posting the manner of work, gaining the appreciation of other experts that are visiting the blog and very important, be more appreciated by the crawlers of the search engines that are madly in love with fresh content.

   d. Verify it periodically
   

   There is nothing more amateurish work than having a portfolio that isn’t fully working. Can anyone image the expression of a client who wants to contact the blog owner but the contact form isn’t working? It is recommended to check it periodically, often is safer.

   e. Promote it everywhere
   

   It is the latest item, but by far it’s the most important, it’s a mistake made too frequent – to launch the portfolio and wait for the clients. The Internet is a crowded place and there are tons of better portfolios, but usually the clients are gained by the most active ones, not by the best. No matter which modalities someone may use, being social media or paid campaigns there is a single requirement to follow: a great amount of visitors that must be converted into clients.

   The conclusion is pretty simple; a portfolio without any substantial promotional strategy is a nice project, but clearly, unprofitable.

Lief is one of the creative designers at DesignArticleWriters, he love to play with tools commonly useful for designers and media lovers. You’ll find him playing with Photoshop, Youtube and Youtube to mp3 in his free time.

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