How Best to Structure Your Writing Portfolio

This can be a really useful feature for categorising your articles and getting across the message that you want.

This articles looks at some of the common ways of structuring your portfolio and gives some good example portfolios.

Site structure

One-page site

One page portfolios are very common and are great for displaying a few of your best articles. However, they make it harder to display articles grouped by publication or topic and because they are smaller sites they're likely to perform worse in search engine rankings.

Publications pages

If you want to highlight a few prominent publications you have written for then displaying articles by publication makes sense.

Great for:

• Writers who have written for 2-5 publications.
• Those with well known publications on their publication list.
• Authors who want to build a reputation for writing in a specific field.

Less suited for:

• Writers who have written for many (5+) publications they want to display articles for.
• Writers who want to emphasise their diversity in topic choices.

Miriam Malek has her portfolio organised by publication with one page for each.

Topic pages

If you've only written for one or two publications or you've written for many different publications, grouping your articles on pages for different topics can be a good way to display your articles.

Great for:

• Writers who have written for a lot of publications.
• Writers who don't want to draw emphasis to the publications they have written for and focus on their articles.
• Authors who want to build a reputation for writing in a range of topics.

Less suited for:

• Those with well known publications on their publication list.
• Writers who want to emphasise their diversity in topic choices.

Hidde Boersma's makes good use of a mixture of pages, including a 'Top 12 articles' page:

Other pages

Of course lots of other pages can be added to your portfolio. Common pages include:

• About page
• Contact page
• CV or Résumé page

Joshua Cannon's portfolio uses a single page with a résumé page:

Inspired to create your portfolio? Sign-up for free to create yours.