A potential client recently asked me for some writing samples. “No problem,” I thought, and went to my website to gather some links. But when I clicked — horrors — several of my choicest samples opened to a “404-page not found” message. Fortunately, in an uncharacteristic fit of foresight and organization, I’d saved most of the links as web archive files. Cue several hours of fiddling around in Photoshop: cutting and pasting, fixing weird formatting errors, painstakingly recreating those files as PDFs. Several hours. And I’m still not finished.
I was still mired in my website ordeal when I discovered Pressfolios this week. The portfolio site for journalists just launched in public beta and it promises a hassle-free way of updating your portfolio and archiving articles that have been taken offline. According to a post on Journalism.co.uk, “every story that is added, irrespective of the type of account, will have a ‘screenshot style’ PDF of the original article’s web pages and a ‘full text back-up’, in the style of Instapaper or Pocket, both available in the user’s personal repository should their story ever go offline from the original publisher’s site.”
It’s exactly what I never realized I needed.
TechCrunch also posted about the site this week in a post titled, charmingly, Journalism May Be Collapsing, But With Pressfolios, At Least You Can Build A Nice Portfolio. In an interview with TechCrunch, Pressfolios co-founder Marc Samson says “our platform simultaneously serves as a personal repository, a cloud backup service, and a website builder, all wrapped into one.”
There are, of course, other ways to archive your online work. Multimedia journalist and Story Board contributor H.G. Watson got in touch yesterday to recommend using Issuu to build a portfolio that can be embedded into your website or on your LinkedIn page.
“I designed my portfolio in InDesign and then uploaded it to Issuu. I find doing it this way is a lot easier to read, you don’t run into the expired links issue and you can fix any typos that appeared in the original work,” she says.
“Plus, I’ve had really great response from employers to that portfolio – they’re impressed when you can show a little design savvy.”
You can see how an Issuu-powered portfolio looks on her website, which is hosted on Squarespace.
But for freelancers without the time, the knowledge or the confidence to design a portfolio and set up their own website, Pressfolios appears to be a quick and easy solution. A free account gives you 12 article uploads. Or you can pay $12 a month for the Pro account, which offers unlimited story uploads plus other perks like a custom domain name and automatic uploads via RSS.
How do you manage your online freelance portfolio? Have you found a good solution to the expired links problem? We’d love to have your input in the comments section below.