Site visitors spend around 6 seconds looking at a homepage. This means that in those 6 seconds, they scan homepage content and decide whether they want to stay on a website or leave. And if they are not pleased with what they are seeing, they are going to close the tab on a site and never look back.
The point of this short horror story?
Nowadays, people (especially potential clients and recruiters) simply don’t have the patience nor the time to spend minutes looking at something that doesn’t seem appealing or interesting to them. That being said, if you don’t want to be skipped, overlooked, or dismissed, we would advise you to invest time into perfecting the homepage of your online portfolio and give potential clients exactly what they want to see.
Now, we knew about this “issue” when we were designing our portfolio WordPress themes, which is why most of them have edge-to-edge sliders that allow you to show recruiters your most prominent work right away. Sliders are there to help you get recruiters’ attention and provide potential clients a glimpse of what you have to offer. The slider is there to encourage them to check out the Projects page (and even the About page). (If you bought a theme that doesn’t have a slider, like Coleta, you don’t worry about your projects not being appropriately shown 一 all you work will be presented flawlessly in columns).
But, just because you added some of your most recent, stunning projects, doesn’t mean you are not entirely done designing the homepage. If you use a theme that gives you the option to write a short “welcome to the site” message (Renzo has this option, for example), don’t skip on typing it. Something along the line “Hi, my name is [Your name], and I am an award-winning designer/p photographer/illustrator. Welcome to my portfolio!” should work just fine.
And that’s it.
Homepage 一 done!