Whether you’re looking for a longer-term role or a quicker freelance job, you’ll want to make a great first impression.
As potential employers will search the internet to find top and accessible talent, this gives web designers a grand opportunity to be perpetually advertising themselves. The key is to both offer a very tangible showcase of your ability while also hitting on the key points that you know employers are looking into.
Build the Websites to Showcase Your Skills
Building a website takes many forms these days. Some of the most striking and impressive are those that cater to a massive array of options in a very palatable way. Take, for example, the website of games from Paddy Power. There are hundreds of games here, but the web design has enabled smooth navigation to them all.
There is the aspect of sectioning collections for the scroll to offer a full showcase, but the animated search bar and options to reveal more help to show how well it’s designed to both be accessible and include everything on offer. Demonstrating an ability to overcome such large challenges as these well can be a big selling point.
Accessibility isn’t always the point for the brand or business, though. Looking at the tennis-centric Lacoste website Ace Breaker, you’ve got a landing page for a prize-winning app. To bolster this, it’s fully animated and straightforward while being heavily branded with the crocodile logo and the green associated with Lacoste.
Of course, you can’t just wait for such a job to fall your way – especially if you’re starting out. So, make your own websites. Buy some cheap domains, have one be your hub website for your key details and links, and then link out to your portfolio of sites. Demonstrate your range with minimalistic, utility, informative, and more design angles.
Adjust to Suit What Employers are Looking for
With a bunch of sites linked out to that showcase your skill and range, you then need to build up your own professional website with information that will hit all of the marks for potential employers. Rather than making this to show everything you think needs to be shown, make it to hit the checklist for those looking to hire.
This is to say, essentially, use hiring guides like the one from Tidy Design as your guide. Keep everything as concise as you can, as these people don’t have a huge amount of time to spend on each potential applicant, but showcase the key details like your technical skills in each format and how your design process works.
Around that, be sure to detail that your communication skills are top-notch, and offer multiple ways for them to contact you as well as an expected reply time. Inform the reader of your process and what you expect each stage to feature, what you do for ongoing support, and either list your prices or offer a way to get a quick quote.
Showing your skills in action and offering clear details on what it’d mean to hire you is the way to catch would-be employers and get you that all-important interview.
