How to Create a Portfolio Website for Job Searching [Making Websites Eye-Catching to Viewers!]

So, you just graduated college with a degree in Digital Marketing and you’re out there looking for jobs, but you don’t know how to create a portfolio website about yourself to show companies who you really are. Well, you’ve come to the right place! I’m going to tell you about what a portfolio websites are and how you can make one that’s got the right information that you should let employers know and how to make it eye-catching!

 

What is a Portfolio Website?

As this article from (Wix) says, a portfolio website is “an opportunity to make something that shows off your skills and conveys your unique voice, while looking just as crisp and professional as any of your other work.”

The first thing to do is consider “What do you want your portfolio to look like?” This would be things ranging from color, typography, which is a fancy way of saying the style and appearance of text for example, and how you want your website laid out. This is the first thing that will show off who you are by showing what colors and things you use to bring a website together.

Second, choose how you want people to move around your website. That could be scrolling continuously on one page or by having a navigation bar on your website and having your information spread out onto multiple pages. This one is a relatively simple decision, but I think it would be best to decide which one you’ll use before you start laying the ground work for the rest of your website.

Third, Make sure to show off your projects you have made in the past that you are proud of. This really gets employers attention! They get to see what you have done in the past and what you are capable of doing in the future if they were to hire you to work for their company. An example of this could be a program you made for elementary kids that help them learn geometry.

Fourth, anytime you have images on your website, make sure that you upload the highest quality of the images you can find because it looks better than just trying to figure out what this blurry picture is supposed to be of. Lol.

Fifth, there’s content that you can’t forget to add to the website, and this is the most important. You need a homepage, a place where people that check out your website can start from and choose where to go from there, an about page, tell the people who you are and give them a short little biography about yourself. Make sure you give it your own personality, whether that is puns or illustrations that make you feel like you.

Sixth, this kind of correlates to the second step, but make sure that the user experience on your website flows smoothly. You don’t want to build a website that is so confusing, that even you don’t know where to go to get to a specific page. That wouldn’t be good at all! Start off with things like a wireframe. A wireframe is basically where you just sketch out on paper what you want your website to look like and as you start creating your website, you can slowly start adding in the elements you wanted one at a time.

Seventh, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. After you’ve made your website, now you’ve got to consider “How are people going to find my website?” Start with things like writing alternative text for your images. This is usually only seen on your website if someone’s browser is blocking images or if the browser can’t load images, but it’s a good thing to do anyways because it helps search engines learn more about your website’s accessibility.

Eighth, with the ongoing development of smart phones, most people that search the internet are using their phones more often than their laptops or desktops, so it’s a good idea to take the elements on your website and optimize them for mobile view. Depending on how you’re developing your website, whether that’s by using Notepad++ or using a program like Adobe Dreamweaver to help you in that process, usually a mobile view of a website means that there are less buttons and everything will be in a more condensed layout.

Ninth, after you’ve gotten this far in making your portfolio website, it’s a good idea to ask family or friends in what they think about your website before you publish it for the public to see. This is a great way to get honest feedback on something that you created and to also find out if they believe you left out anything that you should add or take out anything that they believe shouldn’t belong on there.

Lastly, it’s time to publish your website online and promote it on your social media channels, if you have any. Not only will this help more people to find you online, but it will also improve the SEO ranking for your website and you’ll get to hear some honest feedback from others. I hope this was as helpful for you as it was for me and now, head on out there and create the best website anyone has ever seen!

What is A/B Testing and How Does it Help? [A/B Testing for YouTube Thumbnails]

A/B Testing

A/B testing, by my definition, is where you are trying to advertise one thing, but are showcasing it two different ways, and figuring out which way of advertising brings in the bigger audience over the other.

This helps in a big way because you may like sticking to one way of advertising something because that is always the way you have been doing things or it may just be because you like how it looks. In this instance, that's not always the case. Sometimes, different visuals appeal to the audience in different ways than one might think. For instance, I have been making YouTube videos now for almost 10 years and I've never stopped doing it because it is fun and exciting! There have been some times where I can't choose a thumbnail and I will end up having two different versions that I like, but can't choose by myself.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy, which is a great source to use on YouTube, gives some more insight into what you should look out for when doing an A/B test. One important thing to note that they mention is that even if you do an A/B test with the same video and different thumbnails, you will definitely get different results every time because every person is active different times of the day and different days of the week which will change your results a lot.

So, when making a YouTube thumbnail, each part of the uploaded video gets put into consideration: The title of the video, the description you added that most of the time describes what the video is about, and the tags. By tags, I mean short terms that a person searches for on the search bar in YouTube that helps them to find your videos.

Take into consideration, if you were a YouTuber that makes videos that are focused towards younger kids, you would want to make the thumbnails colorful and have the cartoon characters they love somewhere on the thumbnails too. If you were to make a different thumbnail that did not have anything at all that kids liked on it, and it was black and white, there is no way that they would want to click on a thumbnail that didn't make them happy.

You may have thought that I forgot to mention how A/B testing helps. Well, don't worry, that's where I'm getting to right now.

 

How Does This All Help?

The way A/B testing helps, whether it is for digital marketing advertisements on websites or if it is for comparing how different thumbnails bring in different audiences on your YouTube channel's videos, they both basically are doing the same thing. They are comparing CTRs. A CTR is short for click-through-rate and that is determined by how many people out there see your ad and click it because they want to learn more about your advertisement. CTRs are the most basic thing A/B tests start analyzing. The next thing they look for is where and when your audience is clicking your ad from. Every person, as I said before, is active during different times and days of the week, so the results will still differ every time. Say, if your main audience on YouTube watches your videos mostly on Friday nights at 5:00 PM CT, then that's when you would want to upload your videos because if you were to upload your videos any other time of the day or on a different day, even with the thumbnail that would have grabbed their attention, it won't bring in as many people because they are not expecting you to release anything on a different time schedule than what you have already planned.

Lastly, I know I have not mentioned this at all yet, but the last thing that gets put into consideration is the different traffic sources that your advertisements get put on. Not only do my YouTube videos send out notifications to my subscribers that I uploaded a video, but it also sends out a tweet to my Twitter too for anybody that follows me on there so they will also know I just uploaded new content. Continuing the A/B test through different sources, you will still get different results because your audience won't know what to think right away since they usually know how your thumbnails are designed and if they look different from usual, there will be less CTRs.

If you take all of these considerations into mind, then you will be able to successfully create an advertisement (or YouTube thumbnail) that will appeal to your audience the way you want.