Blog your portfolio? It’s free, easy, and, smart.

Craig Swanson, founder of CreativeTechs, the Seattle-based technology support service for design firms, ad agencies, in-house departments, and freelancers, frequently gives talks and workshops at the School of Visual Concepts. This fall, Craig shared some compelling reasons why the aforementioned creative firms should consider using a blog to show off their portfolios to the world.

The problems with most portfolio sites.
If you don’t have one, you already know this problem: It can be difficult to get a site off the ground if you don’t have the technical skill, the money, or the mojo.

If you do have a portfolio site, then this hang-up probably rings a bell: If your site is hard to maintain (as most are) then your online portfolio tends to grow a little stale.

Add to this drawback the special pitfalls of Flash-based portfolio sites. If a prospect lands on one of your samples and would like to share it with their colleagues, they can’t, as Flash pages typically don’t have unique URLs. For the same reason, most Flash portfolio sites don’t show up in Google rankings, so it’s near impossible for prospective clients to find you if they run across a sample of your work they like.

Try this experiment: Use Google to see if you can find out who did ZymoGenetics’ last annual report. Chances are, you’ll discover in the first few Google listings that it was Phinney Bischoff Design House. Now try the same thing to figure out who did Adaptec’s most recent annual. Congratulations if you determined it was San Francisco’s esteemed design firm, Cahan & Associates, because Google doesn’t give you much of a clue. The culprit? Cahan has a Flash portfolio site that’s not searchable by Google.

Blogs to the rescue?
Blogs aren’t exactly the cure-all to creative firms’ web woes, but they knock down a surprising number of issues. Let’s take them one at a time:

They’re either free or low cost.
If you do your blogging with Blogger or WordPress (that’s the platform used for this site) you can sign up for free, and both services will even host your site, as well as all the images and files you’d like your visitors to see and download. If you want to host your blog/site with your own hosting service under your own domain name, that’s easy (Blogger) or semi-easy (WordPress) to do.

They’re easy to update.
Most blog platforms make it quite simple to add a new item to your portfolio. You use a Word-like interface to type in your copy, and then upload your samples as jpg or gif images. Both a thumbnail image and a full-size version can be created automatically. Another advantage: You can post new portfolio pieces from any computer with web access, or for the truly time-starved, you can email in a post from a Blackberry.

They’re modifiable to match your design look and feel.
When you sign up for a blog, you’ll get to choose from a number of standard templates–none of which will resemble your firm’s branding look. But if you, or a hired gun, can tweak CSS and HTML a bit, you can modify the templates to include your colors, typography, and branding. Here’s an example of a portfolio blog built to match a design firm’s main site.

They’re very findable by Google.
Each time you add an item to a portfolio blog, the blogging platform creates a separate HTML page for your entry which can have a very descriptive, Google-friendly URL, such as www.workerbees.com/2006/03/wetpaint-wiki-web-site.html. If a prospective client wants to know who worked on Wetpaint’s site, typing the term “wetpaint web site” into Google answers the question within the first five results.

Don’t just stand there. Blog something.
If you don’t have a web site at all for your company or freelance business, now there’s no excuse to put it off. Get busy and you could have your basic site up and running in the next 30 minutes. If your studio already has a site, there’s no need to scrap it. But consider adding a blog–even if your site already has a portfolio section–if for no other reason than so Google (and your prospective clients) can find you more easily.