Mastering Your Graphic Design Portfolio

The homepage of your portfolio or any website for that matter is where the user of that website starts their journey. Most websites are missing this insanely powerful trick. Actually, it’s less of a trick and more of a psychological method to gain more sales and interest on a website. Now I use this psychological method on my most recent landing page where I sell a logo design E-Guide and it’s worked really well actually. I gained over 200 sales in the first 40 hours of publishing my website.

So many websites fail to grasp the main goal of a homepage. But do you know what the main goals are of a homepage? It’s pretty simple once you actually think about it. The homepage’s aim is to entice people deeper into the website and then convert the users into sales or clicks elsewhere. Great, that sounds almost obvious and all well and good but what about this psychological trick that I’m talking about. The technique that works so well is something I call the user path in summary. It goes from showing what the user wants to presenting a problem. And then presenting some solutions and finally directing them with the Call to Action.

Let’s take a look at how this actually functions in real life use. So when somebody clicks onto a home page it isn’t flashy animation or cool graphics that will generate more sales and more clicks? NO NO

You need to understand first, what a user is on your website in the first place. More often than not sales come from you adding value and solving a problem. That’s why money is exchanged. So if it’s a graphic design portfolio, it will be somebody who needs a logo design or other graphic design services. In my example, people click on logodesignprocess.com because they are interested in getting a guide. That will help them with their logo design career and process.

So at the very top of my home page. I have a short paragraph that states. The guide I’m selling will help the users create more professional and more effective logo designs.

And that is of course true I’ve had only positive feedback on this guide. But anyway that is the first step in the user path.

Next is arguably the most important and that is presenting the problem. As you can see next on my homepage, I briefly talk about the problem at hand. That being that many designers find themselves confused when embarking on a logo design project. And many designers face rejection from their clients when showing their designs.

That is step two in the user path now the user understands exactly what the problem is and they know what they want to achieve.

Next up is to present the solution in the next paragraph below. I talk about how the E-Guide takes the user on a journey from start to finish along the logo design process. And below that is a snapshot of one of the pages on the guide to solidify the solution.

Below that, I have six key points that show exactly how the guide will solve their problems. And yes these are all true and genuine. I wholeheartedly believe my products and the feedback reflects that.

The six key points here clearly illustrate how the guide will solve the user’s problems. So you can see how when logging onto a homepage. A use of the website has moved through the first three steps in the user path method.

The next and final step is to direct traffic to the conversion location with CTAs or Call to Actions. Here I have a Buy Now button directly below. And yes I could use a different bright color to make it stand out more. And I might change this in the future. But you want to clearly present a CTA so the user notices them with ease.

This technique works across the board on any kind of home page if it’s trying to get clicks and conversions. But of course, it will look slightly different on each website. It depends on what the goal is of the website. What they’re selling if anything at all and what the main user base is made up of. For your portfolios, you should try and work into the home page a short hint at the kind of problems your graphic design services aim to solve. And also a hint at the kind of solutions that you offer. The actual project pages themselves will go deeper into this. At the end of each project try and have a CTA button. That takes a user to a contact page. Where they can contact you for work.

The user path for a portfolio is slightly different from my logo guide landing page. But the same method kind of prevails.