If you’re a service business or if you create something like a website, app or whatever it might be for your clients then you know the importance of case studies or the work portfolio section on your website.
Those pages are probably in the top three or top five on your website. The reason for that is because your visitors, your potential customers, want to see what you’ve done in the past. They want to see what they can expect if they choose you to work with.
I visit a good number of business websites. I see a lot of good things, but I see other things that kind of make me scratch my head. And I say that literally because sometimes I visit a website of a business and I can’t figure out what they do and their portfolios confuse me.
So we’re going to get into some tips to help improve your case studies and portfolio pages so that they really help you convert visitors into clients.
Tip #1. Categories: What Do You Do?
The big one for me is that I’ll go to these business websites and on the homepage it will take me awhile…I’m talking maybe even a minute or more to figure out what the business actually does for its clients.
Isn’t that kind of crazy?
The first thing any business website should do, at least in my opinion, is simply state what they do for their clients. It can be difficult because when you’re involved in the business all the time it’s easy to think that a visitor on your site will know what you do.
But that’s usually not the case. A heading on the homepage that states what you do is the first step and it carries over to your portfolio or case studies page.
On those pages it’s important to break things down into categories especially if you do more than one specific service. Maybe you’re in development and you do WordPress, apps and a few other things. Break the case studies and examples into categories and possibly industries.
Good organizing makes it easy for new visitors to understand what you can offer to do for them as well as find the examples that are most relevant to what they’re looking for you to potentially do for them.
Tip #2. Specific Projects: What Did You Do?
Then once you get into specific projects it’s important to simply state what you did for that project.
There have been times when I’ve been on the homepage of a business. I couldn’t figure out what they did so I clicked through to the case studies page. Then I clicked on a case study and I still couldn’t figure out what they did. There might be images of a website. It might look great, but there’s no indication as to what the business actually did on this project. Did they do the design? Did they do the coding? Did they just create the images? Do they really do the marketing and advertising for the company?
Your visitors are going to have these kinds of questions if it’s not obvious what you actually did on specific projects. It might seem basic to you, but simplicity is beauty and it really communicates what you can do for your potential clients.
These first two tips are related and they are basic and easy tips, but you can’t overlook them because you’ll lose customers because they won’t be able to figure out what you actually did with the work in your portfolio.
Tip #3. Showing Off: Don’t Over-Wow Them
It’s good to be proud of the work you do. You can show off your skills in the cases studies and portfolio sections on your site, but don’t go overboard. You don’t want to over-wow new visitors to your site.
You used to kind of see this with Flash-graphics and things like that back in the day. You see it a little bit maybe with businesses that create videos or fancy designs and advertisements.
When you open a work page with all kinds of good designs they can really all stand out at once and as a result it’s like standing in the candy aisle at the grocery store. There is too much color and too much craziness to know what’s going on and you can’t focus on the one that you really want.
If you have some cool things then pare it back and give them out in doses. Maybe have good, but not really in-your-face feature images on the main case studies page. Then when they open the specific project they can see more of the really good stuff, but give it to them one at a time so they can scroll through instead of a bunch of thumbnails.
Hold things back just a bit and it will make the really great stuff stand out instead of getting lost in the crowd.
Conclusion
These are just a few simple tips for your case studies and work portfolio pages. It’s just three simple tips. You probably already know them, but it’s a little reminder of how simple can be good especially when it comes to selling your services to new visitors that really don’t know exactly what you can do for them.
