If you are a creative person, you’ll need a forum to express yourself. The internet serves as a forum for many freelancers to showcase their folio of creative work. WordPress, being an extensible and customizable platform is a great fit for a content management system to showcase a portfolio.
While WordPress is an ideal platform to display a portfolio, you would need a theme to handle the design and appearance of your website. A theme changes the way your website appears in a visitor’s browser, and so you see why choosing an appropriate theme is important.
When it comes to a portfolio website, the focus is always on images. Since it is a theme that governs the way in which your website appears, selecting the correct theme is that much more important when it comes to a portfolio website. Here are the features that you should look for in a WordPress Theme for your portfolio based website:
- The layout is very important for a portfolio site. Your theme should allow you great flexibility in choosing the layout that displays your portfolio in a most attractive manner.
- Customization is yet another feature you should look for while choosing a portfolio theme. You may need to modify and alter the layout, and control what goes where on the website, and the theme should support you in achieving the display. A wide variety of colors, fonts and design elements should be available.
- Grids are highly desirable in a portfolio theme. You should check for pre-made grid formats, as well as the freedom to alter these grids or design any kind of grid that you like. Post formats with different grid layouts can also help you decide the layout that you want. Or they can serve as a basic template which you can alter to get the layout you want.
- Minimalist is the trend for websites in general and for portfolio websites in particular. This kind of design helps to focus attention on the contents of the website rather than distracting the viewer with fancy design elements. Fanciful elements in a theme can increase a website’s visual appeal. But they must be balanced with the need to retain the focus on the content of the website rather than the design.
- The images of the website must be displayed in the best possible manner. And so, the theme must support sharp images and graphics. The theme must be responsive and retina ready. The lightbox feature will also help to highlight individual portfolio items. Sliders are a welcome addition to the list of features for a portfolio theme, as they help to focus attention on content that you wish to highlight.
- Another feature that you may want is a filtering option. This way a reader can sort the portfolio and navigate the portfolio items easily. It enhances user experience on the website.
In this post, we’ve collected 10 portfolio themes that are designed to meet the demand of creative professionals including photographers, illustrators, designers, artists and the like.
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And Finally
While the design is important, there’s a lot that’s happening behind the screen that’s important too. Code quality, site speed, SEO and more are also relevant factors while choosing your theme. The themes in this list pretty much take care of all aspects. Moreover, they are free and you can try them out with confidence.
Do let us know how the these WordPress Portfolio themes worked for you.