Portfolio or Gallery Pages

We all know that when testing chefs, the proof is in the pudding that they have just cooked. A great pudding makes for a popular, well paid chef and a poor pudding makes for a hospital or airline cook (only kidding).

Proof is in The Pudding

In the real world it is pretty easy to get people to test your pudding. Online you have a 'remoteness' issue to deal with. Thankfully that is really easy to overcome with a bit of passion and simple hard work. Actually the work is not hard at all but if I overstate the case maybe you won't be so likely to back down when you have to do said work.

I will use the words Portfolio and Gallery interchangeably as essentially they serve exactly the same function.

Let's start with the theory of why you need a Portfolio or Gallery to show your work. We have covered most of it already. People need to be convinced that your product or service is the realisation of their dream. The Product pages should tell the customer all of the facts and details about the product but there is almost always a lot more that you can show people. You want to show people this because the more you can engage a person's emotions the greater chance you have of making them fall in love with your product.

What to put in your Gallery

Simply put, everything that adds value to your product from an emotional point of view belongs in your gallery. More specifically consider:

before : after Xpresso page After

Completed Projects - are very valuable as they are pudding in it's most direct form.

Get professional photos taken and arrange them in an article explaining what the problem was to cause you being brought in, followed by an explanation of what you did and how you did it. Of course round out with clear before, during and after shots so people can see very easily how your product made a marked improvement.

Generally I suggest having a main Gallery page with overviews of projects and then break each project out into it's own individual page so you have plenty of room to explain everything. This organization is good for readers and SEO as well.

Product in Action & How To - seeing your product in action can be very valuable to people. A set of photos with an explanation goes a long way to helping users understand your product.

These days making and hosting video is really easy due to services like YouTube. Your video doesn't have to be a full Hollywood production. Keep it simple and use a salesman or product expert to simply show some of the features in action.

You can also include How To articles as they can really help people to establish a relationship with you as an expert and your product as a good solution. Blogs can be form of portfolio if they are used to show your style or expertise.

Testimonials - of people who use your product are very valuable. People like to identify with people like themselves. If you sell golf clubs then showing other golfers using your clubs and being happy with them will help make target users see themselves using your product.

Bob sees Marty using the golf clubs and getting holes-in-one when formerly he took 28 shots to get to the first green (my batting average). Bob starts to think: Maybe I could improve my handicap.

Testimonials with photos or video of real people have greater sway than purely written feedback. If you absolutely cannot get photos then use a chessman type icon like the one of the left as it helps to identify the words next to it as belonging to a person.

Image Galleries - and Light Boxes are very popular with site builders and have their place but please take care with them.

Firstly, make sure images are well presented and look professional. Then make sure that images add value and are well explained. A large collection of seemingly random happy snaps won't help your case.

While a picture can tell a thousand words it can only do this when it has been put into perspective. You need words to do this so make sure images are well captioned or part of an article.

A Gallery for SEO Purposes (getting more visitors)

While initially having and maintaining a gallery on your site can seem like a bit of work, there is a compelling second reason or sub-plot (to the main reason of sales) to have a lively gallery on, or related to, your site. That reason is helping search engines to serve your site as a good answer to relevant questions, i.e. higher ranking. This happens in several ways:

You have more pages with more keywords and keyword phrases which equals both a wider net and bigger target for both the the big keywords but also the wilder long-tail ones that can really help you out.
You have pages dedicated to specific keyword subjects which helps search engines, e.g. pages on this site rank well for the projects I did with "Xpresso" and "Angelo Lauro" as well as "how to write a good headline" (all Google, "pages from Australia").
Search engines like larger sites with more content as they consider them to be more relevant and a greater authority.
Regularly updated sites (and your gallery should be added to every month if at all possible) are indexed more often which helps get your message into seach engines faster.
Plenty of Inbound links are more likely to be achieved if you have something exciting for people to link to on your site. If you write an article about someone they will likely create links in their favourite social media outlet to your site. If you have a great How To article you will also start to attract links from blogs and forums far and wide. These inbound links help search engines to see you as being more relevant and part of the community.

A Real Live One*

I built the Brisbane Proton and euro RV web site up to a regular 3,000 - 4,000 visitors a week in one and half years by building galleries for both cars and caravans. I got one of the salesman to spend some time in the official Proton forums in Malaysia and within weeks we were receiving traffic from Malaysia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Czech Republic, Germany, Britain almost every week as the unique cars I photographed spread virally from forum to forum.

While much of this traffic wouldn't result in a sale in Moorooka, Brisbane, Australia it did help the site to stay in the top of search results for a lot of Proton and Caravan related search terms. After a while the galleries became relatively self-generating as people would approach me with photos and stories they wanted me to publish

Happy Portfolio page building

* apologies for the gratuitous Iron Maiden reference, I can't help myself.