In order to showcase your skills and experiences to potential clients, it's vital that you have a website for your freelance business. Websites for freelance businesses come in all shapes and sizes. However there are a few common characteristics that they should all include. Some of the key elements are:

• A clear explanation on what makes you unique as a freelancer
• A list of your services
• Projects or companies that you have worked for in the past
• An easy to find and descriptive portfolio
• Any positive testimonials
• Multiple methods for contacting you

That may seem like a long list, so let's look at each item specifically and walk through why it's an important component.

Describe what makes you unique

You're going to be competing against countless freelancers. Many of whom have more experience than you and may even charge a lower cost. When I launched my freelance business I had no pre-existing clients and my hourly rate was about 5 times more than many of the freelance competitors I was competing with.

With this in mind I dedicated that my point of differentiation was going to be transparency. A complaint that I heard from many individuals, when working with freelancers, was that they didn't know what work was going on each day. Therefore I decided to focus on explaining my development process. And after a client hired me for a project I made a point to update them daily with each task that I performed.

This made clients feel more comfortable with working with me on their projects and many time led them to give me more work after a project had been completed.

List your services

In the last guide we walked through how to build a list of services. Now that you have your list you need to ensure that they're clearly described on your site.

As we discussed previously, your list should include a high level set of services. From there you should break down each of the items so they have their own detailed description. This will let the client know if you are a good fit for the project they are wanting to hire you for.

Projects or Companies You've Worked With in the Past

Next you'll want to show the logos or names for organizations or projects that you've worked with in the past. If you're just starting you can create logos for portfolio projects you've built and show those.

This section is different than your portfolio showcase. This is simply a nice quick visual that clients like to see. It will give your site a more professional look and help separate you from the competition.

Your portfolio

This is one of the most important components of a freelance site. Many clients will simply skim the rest of the site and spend the majority of their time looking at your portfolio of projects. I know that when I'm looking to hire a sub contractor to work for me the most important criteria I look for is a solid portfolio of projects.

Due to the portfolio's importance when it comes to getting hired by a client, it's also a good choice to include as much detail as possible for each item. For example, if a potential client clicks on the Eventbrite portfolio item it will pop up a modal that explains the work that I performed for the customer.

This is also a great spot to include testimonials from clients.

One mistake that I see many freelancers make is to simply show screenshots of the projects they've worked on. However screenshots won't give potential clients enough information about what type of work that you do. Instead make sure that your portfolio describes exactly what work was performed on the various projects. This will let clients know your specialties and will also give you more credibility than simply listing them on the About Me section.

Testimonials

Make sure to include any positive testimonials that you may have from clients. If you're just launching your freelance business this section can include quotes from past co-workers or bosses that are willing to describe how much they liked working with you.

As you acquire clients, make sure you continue to add to this list of testimonials.

Also, it's helpful to include links to the applications that you worked on. I've seen too many times when freelancers have a great testimonial but don't show the client project. This takes away from the credibility of the testimonial and makes it seem fake.

Contact methods

You need to make it easy for potential clients to contact you. I recommend placing your phone and email information on the site. If you're not comfortable doing that make sure you have a contact form that's easy to navigate to.

Building the site

If you're going through this course you are most likely already a developer or designer. Therefore you already have all of the necessary knowledge for building the website yourself. However here are some helpful tools that can help you quickly get your site live:

• Themeforest - Themeforest has thousands of great HTML/CSS templates that you download, many of them are specific to portfolio type websites.
• Wordpress - Even if you're a backend developer it's perfectly fine to utilize a CMS tool like Wordpress to launch a portfolio website. I'm a Ruby dev, however I have a number of websites that are Wordpress based simply because it's easy to use and it's also search engine friendly.

What's Next

After your site is live you'll be ready to move onto the next guide where I discuss setting up multiple freelance website in order to target specific clients and categories.

Resources

• My portfolio website