Over the past few months, we’ve noticed a lot of portfolios created on Wix.  We’ve seen some remarkable work!  Since there are so many portfolios created every day, we’d like to share some tips to help you build the best site possible.  Here’s a list of the five most important assets to have on your professional portfolio.

1. Creative Work Examples

Lead your site with creative work examples.  You want this to be the main attraction.  Make sure that every item in your portfolio is a completed piece.  If you have a large body of work, you may want to select your best 8 to 12 pieces to display.

Make sure to include the details about each piece including client’s name, start date, complete date, project objectives and materials used.  If you are showcasing a website, make sure you include an active link.

2. Client History

To maximize your credibility, showcase a list of the clients you’ve worked with in the past.  Highlight the most recognizable ones.  If a client has given you a positive recommendation, ask for their permission and quote them on your site.

3. Services and Work Rates

Potential clients should be well aware of the services you offer.  Make sure they are presented in a clear and concise fashion.  If you offer several different services, group them together by category.

Be careful!  Listing work rates can either work for or against you.  If your business has fixed rates for creative services, it will be important to list them openly.  Otherwise, if your rates change on a project basis, take the opportunity to direct potential clients to contact you for a discussion on budget and scope.

4. Company Info

Here’s a chance to tell your story.  Keep it brief and exciting.  Proudly showcase the awards and accomplishments you’ve received throughout your career.  Display the professional organizations that you belong to.  This may also be a great place to post a resume for download.

Don’t forget to include your logo and/or portrait.

5. Contact Form

Your contact form should be a place where clients can contact you directly.  You may want to include other contact information including your business phone number and address.  Feel free to provide links to the rest of your web-universe including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

For more information about developing your portfolio, visit the Wix Learning Portal or visit these fantastic examples on Wix:

Search engine crawlers will index your new Wix website, but it may take them anywhere from 1 month to 3 months.

Three months is a long time and I know that I for one really don’t have that kind of patience.

So for those of you who are like me, here’s some information on your Wix website’s indexing process and what you can do to help.

Read on for 7 super tips to getting google to crawl your site faster

Austin, Texas – The HOW Design Conference came to a close today.  Attendees reconvened for the last workshops and the closing keynote: Mark Randall, “Design Ignites Change”.  We now look toward the future with the lessons learned this week; motivated, energized and full of new ideas.

As designers, we must find the order in chaos.  We must visually express abstract ideas in a clear and compelling fashion.  We must produce cutting edge work without losing sight of our intended audience.  We must take risks, push the limits, and test our personal boundaries.  We must keep the ideas we love, learn from the experience of others, and stay mindful of parts to repair.  At the end of the day, one final product is displayed to the world.  Make it the best it can be.

Wix.com has been proud to attend the HOW Design Conference this year.  In the weeks to come, we will be showcasing the many talented attendees on our HOW Conference Wix Collective.  Stay tuned!

Day 3 is coming to an end at the HOW Design Conference in Austin, Texas.  Attendees have their last chance to view some incredible exhibits including the Type Directors Club, a showcase of award winning typographic design.  Up-and-coming designers exhibit personal work at the HOW Conference Portfolio Review.  The evening will wrap up with a ballroom costume party to Keep Austin Weird!

A highlight of the day was Cameron Moll’s “Good vs. Great Design” seminar which offered tips on how to effectively communicate messages while designing.

Vital information should be simple to read and easy to find.  Use contrast to guide the eye.  Test your work by “blurring” your site.  Regardless of content, the center of attention should be clear.  Take a look:

In Western culture, the eye naturally moves from top left to bottom right, an important point to keep in mind.  By mastering contrast in design, you can guide the reader’s attention around your page and insure key ideas are noted and remembered.

Want to follow Wix.com at HOW in real time?  Check us out on Twitter @WixDesigners.

It’s Day 2 of the HOW Design Conference in Austin, Texas.  The afternoon temperature has dropped to a “cool” 101 degrees.  The energy is still alive and well.  Today, the classroom sessions began, featuring hour-long seminars on topics such as creativity, business, technology, and of course, design.

It’s a lot of information to digest and to avoid overload, we split our days between topics.  Today we attended seminars on business, marketing, and freelance careers.  Tomorrow we will explore creative trends and design theory.

A key takeaway today was learning ways to increase productivity by streamlining work flow.  Clearly, experience increases performance rate, yet new technologies level the playing field by providing tools and techniques that yield professional results. Refer to the old adage “time is money” and you’ll see why it pays to invest in services that can give you a competitive edge.

Wix.com is proud to offer solutions that make building a website faster and more efficient.

And now out for some Austin, Texas blues!

Whether you’ve just created a business, personal, or social presence with the Wix.com web design platform, or you’ve been managing your premium site for a while, below you’ll find tips to take your creation to the next level.

In our ongoing effort to help you maximize your hard work we’ve created a 3 part series of articles filled with tips and tactics on how to effectively promote your site, increase visitors and make you all around, the talk of the town!

In this 1st post we’ll be focusing on Social Marketing – what marketers call “Conversational Marketing tactics”. For the non-marketers out there, marketing has switched recently to talking “WITH” the audience, not “TO” them.

Where traditional advertising methods such as radio, television, newspapers and magazines were about continuously broadcasting what the advertiser had to say to a very wide audience at fairly high costs, Conversational Marketing is about directly conversing and engaging with the audience. And the good news is: the cost of social marketing is the time and effort you invest in it.

Be Yourself. And Be Interesting

A great analogy to keep in mind along the way is “social media is one big party”. If you’re the boring person at the party, you’re probably not making a whole lot of friends. You want to be the person that people want to get to know, laugh with and listen to. People identify with people, not brands. This makes understanding your audience and their online usage trends extremely important and having fun even more so. Be yourself.

So what are the services that will build up your online notoriety, while making new friends along the way?…

Continue reading

We love that design is a universal language and that the web crosses boundaries – and we’re passionate about making Wix accessible to everyone in the world…

We’d like to introduce Ileana the manager of Wix Italiano & Español forums. Thanks Ileana!!

Thanks also to Sebastian for the Wix France forum.

And because we love sharing what you’re making, you’ll also find a range of awesome Wix websites being created by people from, well, Italy and Spain of course!

The Wix Forums

Forum Italiano:

“Ciao a tutti gli users di Wix, buona notizie: lo sapevate che il forum di Wix è anche in italiano?? :O Io sono Ileana, mi occupo dell’assistenza per l’Italia, e sono a vostra disposizione sul forum o via mail all’indirizzo ileana@wix.com.

Nel forum potrete trovare già alcuni tra i temi più discussi su Wix, informazioni utili, e anche alcune traduzioni importanti, ma attendo le vostre domande ed i vostri commenti!
Ricordatevi che siete voi a far crescere il programma con le vostre richieste, e che potete aiutare gli altri users, per cui il vostro contributo è fondamentale! :) A presto!!”

Foro Español
“Hola a todos los usuarios de Wix: buenas noticias: sabíais que el foro de Wix habla castellano también?? :OYo soy Ileana, soy vuestra ayuda  para España y Paises Latinos, y estoy a vuestra disposición en el foro o via e-mail a la dirección Ileana@wix.com.

En el foro ya podéis encontrar algunos de los temas más importantes de Wix, informaciones, y varias traducciones, pero estoy a la espera de vuestras preguntas y comentarios!
Recordad que sois vosotros los que hacen crecer al programa con vuestros requerimientos, y que podéis ayudar los demás usuarios, así que vuestra presencia es fundamental!:) Hasta pronto!!”

Wix Sites from Spain and Italy

Proud we speak your language!!

Looking forward to seeing more Spanish, Latin American, Italian and international Flash websites made with Wix.com!

“ Designing for the web requires a fundamental assumption and understanding that accessing information on a computer screen or on a mobile device is a completely different experience for the user than the one of reading a newspaper, magazine or book or from the one of watching a typical TV set. “

So if you are ready to start designing the “look” of your first free website on Wix, then here are some specific recommendations on how to take the first step in this direction.

These essential recommendations were gathered by Robin Good, Chief Editor of ‘Master New Media Independent Publishing and New Media’, and are only a small part of the new WixPedia learning center…

Wix is now offering support in French. We’ve asked Se’bastien, an avid user of Wix, to lead this effort and below is his introduction to our French speaking users: (to get support in French, please contact frsupport@wix.com) to learn more, go to Wix.com homepage..

Bonjour à tous !

Je suis Sébastien, votre assistant technique Français.

Wix travaillant actuellement sur la traduction de son site en plusieurs langues, je serai votre interlocuteur en cas de besoin (seb@wix.com)

N’hésitez pas à vous inscrire sur le forum je répondrai très rapidement à toutes vos questions et suggestions.

Avoir choisi Wix est pour moi une question de passion, y travailler est un honneur car je suis sûr d’une chose : Grâce à Wix, le web va connaitre un nouveau jour.

Voici un exemple de très beau site réalisé avec Wix par Karl Souprayen, See site here

(cliquez sur la croix clignotante pour entrer)

Apprenez tout de Wix dans le dernier numéro (541) de Micro Hebdo

Merci d’avoir choisi Wix !

Sébastien

We are adding a bit different post today, as we see the need to understand more about Wix and it suitableness to search engines, so here: our first didactic post including tips from our SEO resident expert, Ilan Shriki.

Anyone who tries to promote their website quickly learns that two types of visitors read our websites – humans and search engine robots. No doubt you’ve worked hard on mastering the language of your customer. Today I’d like to focus your efforts towards speaking to a particular breed of machine commonly know as the search engine robot. (Search engine robots are what search engines like google & yahoo send out to ‘crawl the web’ and gather data for their indexing and ranking systems).

SEO: Optimize your Website for Search Engines

Stick ‘SEO’ into google and you’ll get millions of links (206 million last time I checked). But often very little one knows what to actually do to optimize your website for search engines. Whether using a wix.com platform or not, here are some steps/tips we recommend:

• Choose your platform with Care
• Write clean relevant text
• Submit your Website
• Relevant inbound links

1. Choose Your Platform With Care

Before you even write a word, it’s important to ensure your Website is designed in Format that Robots can read.

For most html-based sites this is a given. It is also a given with Wix.

Traditionally, this is not a given with Flash. So if you are thinking of using flash – dynamic visuals being great for humans – Wix may be the solution for you. (Wix creates an html mirror of all your web content that can be read by search engine robots but is invisible to your website visitors).

2. Write Clean Relevant Text

You’ve probably heard that on the web, “content is king”.

This is because although all search engines robots behave differently, the 3 largest engines (google, yahoo & msn) prefer pages with clean and relevant text.

But robots don’t only read the text you write throughout your website. They also read the “page title”, “description”, and “keywords” you select for your website.

Page Title is the most important element for search engines to correctly categorize your website. “Page title” is the title that appears at the top of the browser when visitors view your website.

Description This is what people will read when they find your website on search engines. As search engines typically publish only 20-30words it helps to keep your description short and sweet.

Keywords: keyword selection is also critical. You may know what category/s your website occupies…but we recommend you use look up keywords being used by your market in keyword directories, and include them in your web content.

Here are two great free tools for selecting keywords:

• http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Of course you should also make sure to write for your current & potential customers…

3. Submit Your Website

When you have finished your website, it can also help to let search engines know you exist.

If you are publishing your website on your own domain, you can submit your website to the 3 major search engines by using the links below:

• http://www.google.com/addurl/
• http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

(If you are publishing your website with Wix hosting service, this will happen automatically.)

4. Relevant Inbound Links

“Content is king” is not the only SEO mantra. “Relevant links” is also key.

From an SEO perspective, the more relevant inbound links your site has, the higher the ranking your website will receive on Search Engines.

Here are a few simple ways to increase your inbound links (and help your site get promoted):

• Add your site to Open source Web Directory Dmoz: (Note: it can take a long time for your request to be processed)
• Create links from web directories that are relevant for your website subject area.
• Ask friends and clients with relevant websites to link from their website to yours.

These are just some tips for optimizing your website for search engine robots – without compromising on the language of your customer. We hope you’ve found them helpful! If you do end up using wix feel free to ask our help for any follow on questions.