Websites for portfolio careerists

Having a web presence is a must for virtually all businesses these days but this poses a particular challenge for portfolio careerists, depending on what they do.

Having a career that involves wearing multiple hats might mean needing to have more than one website, more than one email address and all the attendant administrative know-how to look after them all. For instance, if you combine freelance work in one field with say a commercial venture in another plus a part-time role, you could be in a position where you are associated with three websites and three email addresses, at least two of which it is up to you to solely administer.

How then does the portfolio careerist manage this effectively and not compromise on quality? If a professional and convincing web presence is a must for all aspects of your portfolio career this could be a potentially counter-productive venture if you seek to manage it all yourself. It may be that part of your business plan is to build in resources to help maintain your web presence to a high standard. Planning is key. It is so easy to set up a website and then hardly ever get around to updating it. Regular, high quality search engine optimised content is what will get you that ranking you want in Google.

Another approach, which works for me on my website, is to deliberately pitch yourself as a professional portfolio careerist with a site that explains your multi-faceted career and covers all aspects of what you have to offer. You have to be very careful when doing this not to appear in any way incoherent by setting out a clear rationale for your way of working and drawing on the strengths of this type of approach; the broad range of knowledge and skills and the flexibility and adaptability it gives you.

So, my message here is that websites matter for portfolio careerists just as they do for lots of other areas of work but require you to invest some time and energy in thinking through how best to make it work for you because portfolio careers pose an additional set of considerations. Once you get going though, it's really quite exciting.