What belongs on a creative studio portfolio website?
Choose projects, explain your role, check publication approval and connect each portfolio page to a relevant inquiry.
Choose projects that show the work you want to be hired for. For each one, explain what you did, who else contributed and what a prospective client can ask you to do.
Choose work for the projects you want next
A hospitality art director may need to see a complete interior shoot. Someone booking a portrait may need to compare settings and understand the session. If you serve both, give them separate routes into the work.
Write one reason for including each project. Keep an older project if it demonstrates a service or constraint that the newer work does not. Remove near duplicates that add no information. There is no project count to reach in this exercise.
Show the selection to someone unfamiliar with the studio, on a phone as well as a large screen. Ask what they think you offer, which project answers their question and where they would look to contact you. Record their answer before explaining the site.
Give each project enough context to judge it
Give each project a short introduction:
- What was the work? Name the campaign, identity, space, editorial or production.
- What was your role? Identify the parts you handled and credit collaborators.
- What did you have to solve? For example, photographing an occupied hotel without disrupting its guests.
- What can you show? Check approval for the chosen images, names and details.
“Coastal hotel: interiors photography” tells a visitor more than a project code. Include the client, location and result only when you can substantiate and publish them. Label a self-initiated concept so it cannot be mistaken for client work.
For a private residence or a discreet commercial project, agree which images, names and location details may appear. Keep that approval with the image selection. When a project cannot be shown, describe the service without inventing a public client example.
Make the images work for more visitors
Write alt text for the information an image contributes to the page. A purely decorative image can have an empty alternative. An image used as a button needs a description of its action. The W3C image tutorial explains these cases.
Keep project names, credits and service details in page text. Google’s image guidance recommends relevant surrounding text and warns against filling alt text with search phrases.
Ask the designer to check loading size and crops on a narrow screen. A wide room photograph may need a different crop on a phone; faces, signage and furniture details should not disappear by accident. Review the exported images in the page, not just the originals in a folder.
Let a good project lead somewhere
End the page with a related project and a contact link for similar work. “Ask about an interiors shoot” tells the visitor what that link is for.
Before publishing, follow that link yourself. Does the next page still explain the service, where you work and what to send? A portfolio that ends at a generic form loses the context you just established.