75+ Excellent WordPress Portfolio Themes

75+ Excellent WordPress Portfolio Themes

WordPress Portfolio Themes are excellent for business owners and freelancers to get a professional online portfolio set up fast. The word portfolio simply means a bag for carrying loose papers but it has many meanings depending on how it is used. In relation to web pages a portfolio design is typically defined by a popular and often used grid style layout of images of same size. For website owners portfolio page templates therefore can be used to present content in a great looking fashion and in a way that is easy for the users to navigate.

However online portfolios come in many different visual styles and with different features so it is a good idea to be clear on the requirements before choosing a theme to set up a WordPress portfolio. I’ll provide some tips and guidance in this article along with an updated collection of the best WordPress portfolio themes I have been able to find.

Most bloggers will probably agree that WordPress is an excellent choice for blogging. And when it comes to showcasing creative work by designers, photographers etc. it turns out that WordPress has great potential as well. Today a lot of creative professionals have realized this and use WordPress as the engine for building an online reputation. The ease of use of WordPress, the high number of portfolio style themes and plugins available for building a professional portfolio website makes the decision easy.

This article provides a list of magnificent WordPress portfolio themes and will help you get started. Most of the really good themes for building a WordPress portfolio are not free, but certainly you can find great themes that won’t cost anything. Still the premium themes sometimes comes with features that makes your life a bit easier, like regular updates and support. This allows you to focus on your business and creating a cool portfolio. If you need to add portfolio capabilities to an existing theme I recommend you look for some portfolio plugins.

Keep in mind that WordPress themes with responsive layouts are really hot right now because they allow your visitors to see a perfect website/portfolio no matter what device they use. Responsive themes use media queries to deliver layouts that match smartphones, tablets etc. Many of the themes we selected for this article are fully responsive. This post is continuously updated with more useful WordPress portfolio themes and all links are checked!

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.

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Now to the WordPress Portfolio Themes

I have categorized this article into three sections as some may be looking for free themes while others go for premium only. If you think that a great portfolio or WordPress gallery theme is missing let me know by leaving a comment. If you are new to portfolios make sure to check out the tips for choosing a WordPress portfolio theme at the end of this post.

Premium WordPress Portfolio Themes

Flexible Responsive WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Flexible is a sleek and minimal portfolio theme packed full of some awesome features. The theme puts your work first, keeping the design elements to a minimum while still maintaining a definitive modern style. With its filterable, ajax-powered multi-media gallery, Flexible is perhaps our most feature-rich gallery theme yet.

Cubrik Responsive WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Cubrik is a multi-purpose responsive WordPress Template. Features include: portfolio gallery, light box gallery; full screen portfolio slider; unique product customization order wizard with PayPal ecommerce integration; HTML 5 audio and video integration; Ajax enabled blog; shortcodes for contact form, Google map, email subscription form and twitter feed; and extra HTML code for your customization needs such as accordion, tabbing, pricing tables, buttons and more.

Origin WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Origin is a stunning grid-based theme that tells a story through imagery. The theme creates a truly engaging experience by saturating the screen with your beautiful photos. The theme is also responsive, meaning it will look and work great on mobile devices as well. If you are an artist looking to showcase your latest work, or if you are a blogger looking to give your visitors a fun new way to browse your latest posts, then Origin is great choice for you!

Heat Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Heat is a Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme with a very unique layout especially suited for photographers, illustrators, graphic designers, art and creative directors, architects, luxury businesses or bloggers. It’s equally adept at showcasing design or photography projects. Its page templates accommodates multiple galleries, each with as many images as you want.

Lotus, Flexible Multipurpose & Responsive WP Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Lotus is a powerful and flexible WordPress portfolio theme that comes with very rich tools and options to make creating website as simple as possible. For example one of its tools is Smart Page Builder. In short, this is an awesome drag & drop page building tool. By this tool you can create any page (for example home page) layout with very rich collection of web elements in a minute without writing html or touching even one line of code. In other words, you can quickly design unlimited unique looking pages in simple drag & drop visually.

WowWay â€" Interactive & Responsive Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

WowWay is a quite unique and highly interactive WordPress theme for setting up a creative online portfolio. Based on a responsive grid, packed up with lots of cool features and built on a powerful admin panel, this responsive portfolio theme can be your top choice!

Photocrati Focus â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

This theme shows us how cool and flexible WordPress Portfolio and Photography Themes can be. The vendor focus on one thing â€" creating the best photo and portfolio style theme. Photocrati Focus comes with 15 theme styles + four homepage styles for each = 60 looks out of the box (see the demo below). iPad & iPhone compatibility and tons more!

Nimble Responsive -  MORE INFO / DEMO

Nimble is a big, bold, and beautiful theme that doesn’t let its own style get in the way. With each design I struggle to strike a balance between style and function. Nimble’s colors are toned down but still delicious and its style is bold but still leaves room to breath. Browsing Nimble on a 27? Cinema Display is quite a treat, but so is browsing the theme on a small screen as well due to Nimble’s fully responsive design

Responsy WP â€" Responsive WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Responsy is a responsive html5 wordpress theme suitable for personal portfolios or creative agencies. Responsy has been coded in HTML5 & CSS3 and jQuery. It has a solid flexible responsive layout that scales from 320px to 1170px. Responsy have a nice portfolio template a with responsive grid layout.

NOVA â€" Responsive Business Portfolio â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Nova is a sharp, simplistic design that makes for an intuitive user experience. Nova’s biggest strength is its homepage, which allows you to organize your content into two areas. The Featured Slider is perhaps the most versatile slider we have built, and comes with multiple slider variations that breath new life into the design.

Vertue â€" Clean And Minimal AJAX Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Vertue: a nice and simple, clean and minimal WordPress theme ideal for anyone looking to showcase their awesome work in an awesome way. And on top of that it’s rocking a pretty mean blog too!

Bigbang â€" Responsive WordPress Template â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Bigbang is a feature-rich portfolio template with a fully table less design. It’s 100% responsive adapting to whatever device you can throw at it and it’s aesthetically and simple design is very unique showing that a minimalistic design can be powerful. It features several page templates including 2 different layout templates, 6 portfolio post formats, single page portfolio, 6 blog page and 6 single page layouts. Add to that a jQuery flexslider, socialize icons widget, photo-stream widget supporting the most popular social media pages.

Status â€" Parallax and modular Theme  â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Status is new parallax WordPress theme with modular and fully responsive layout. Theme is suited for business or portfolio websites. Theme includes lots of advanced features and functions and is based on solid backend framework.

Photolux â€" Photography Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Photolux is a powerful and elegant Portfolio and Photography WordPress Theme which is best suited for photographers and creatives who use portfolios to showcase their work. Photolux theme is powered by the advanced Pexeto Panel, which provides tons of options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme â€" it is well suited for both beginners with no coding knowledge and developers. The theme comes with three base skin choices: Dark, Light and Transparent, as well as numerous of back-end options for easy customization and building your skin.

Yin & Yang â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Yin & Yang is a light, minimalistic, simple to use portfolio theme. Quick to setup and easy to customize, thanks to the powerful admin panel, and the detailed documentation, Yin & Yang is the perfect theme for showcasing your most important work directly in front of your potential clients. Yin & Yang has got you covered on all fronts, so if you ever get stuck on anything, rest assured that you’re going to get the help of a professional, if and when you need it, because Yin & Yang comes with excellent customer support.

Envisioned WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Envisioned is a beautiful and powerful portfolio theme that enables you to easily create professional, multi-media galleries. Envisioned has the most powerful gallery features of any of our themes, allowing you to produce versatile layouts of various sizes and aspect ratios.

AREA53 â€" A Responsive WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

AREA53 is a Responsive (full) HTML5 with a cool responsive slider. It’s full featured with the Content Composer to create professional pages in minutes, filterable portfolio and much more.

Gridlocked Minimalistic WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Gridlocked is a grid-based, post-format supporting, layout-shuffling, minimalistic theme for creatives. It is both a classic portfolio for showcasing your work and a modern tumblr-style blogging system. A truly versatile theme, Gridlocked can be configured to focus on your work, your blogging, or both. Support for post formats means you can jazz up your blog with your own self-hosted video, audio, images, galleries, asides, links, quotes and of course good old standard posts.

Classica: Minimalistic WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Classica is a beautifully minimalistic portfolio theme, free from gimmick and trend, making your talent the focal point of your portfolio â€" the way it should be. Present your work in a professional manor with a timeless design.

Square: Responsive WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Square is a clean, minimal yet powerful WordPress theme. Square has a compatible layout with mobile devices. We have tested it in iPhone, iPad and many other mobile devices. It contains two homepage types one for portfolio, and another for business purposes.

Angular â€" Responsive Portfolio â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Angular is a responsive WordPress Theme (try resizing your browser), suited for users who want to showcase their work on a neat portfolio site. The Theme is built on top of the fabulous Avia Framework and comes with support for the bbPress Forum plugin, just in case you need it!

ShowyCase â€" Portfolio / Photography WP Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

ShowyCase is a professional, super flexible and customizable portfolio / design agency / photography theme for WordPress. With 2 starter color skin colors, unlimited background image / colors, unlimited secondary color, 4 home templates and 4 portfolio templates all wrapped in modern clean design, Full multiple portfolios support with filtering ability, you almost have all what you need to build your perfect portfolio website.

Chameleon WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Chameleons are known for their ability to change the color of their skin. The patterns and color combinations you find in chameleons are almost endless, and our new theme is no different! Chameleon was created to be a simple and professional theme with loads of customization options that do not require web development experience to utilize.

Board â€" WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Board is a clean, suave theme designed to give your users the best experience while browsing your portfolio & blog.

Artiste: Professional Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Artiste is an “all-about-the-work” WordPress portfolio theme for the professional creative. It’s clean yet functional, and concentrates on showcasing your work to potential clients and employers with little distraction. Go get hired more.

Expression Photography Responsive WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Expression is a cool responsive WordPress photo theme, best suited for photographers and creatives who use portfolios to effectively present their work. Expression theme is powered by the advanced Pexeto Panel, which provides tons of options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme. With all the styling options provided you can easily customize the appearance of the theme and build you own custom skin.

Punch â€" Responsive Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Punch is a premium responsive WordPress theme that uses slick shape overlays and cool animations â€" perfect for any creative or digital agency. With powerful meta options and features, Punch is ready to help you show off your work the way you want to with stunning precision.

Locus One Page â€" WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

This is as the name indicates an one page theme and it really stands out visually.

VideoPlus â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Cool new video portfolio theme from Theme Junkie with a clean and modern look and feel.

PURITY â€" Minimalistic WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Purity is a Clean and Minimal New WordPress Theme with a ‘BOLD’ feel that can be easily used as a personal portfolio or a business website. With an extensive documentation and a demo content you won’t have any problems setting your page up.

Aware â€" Responsive WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Aware is an interactive, responsive portfolio theme perfect for freelancers, web designers, photographers and videographers alike. Its user interactive interface delightfully enhances your most loved portfolio pieces. Now, you can take your portfolio with you, in your pocket.

Daisho â€" Flexible WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Daisho is a portfolio solution for creative professionals and companies looking for a minimal and professional look. Flexible and responsive presentation, smooth navigational flow and clutter-free approach. Put your works in focus.

Roya â€" Responsive AJAX Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Roya is a Beautiful Responsive Portfolio Theme for WordPess. It uses AJAX for loading new contents, It’s designed to be super fast and give the user a seamless experience.

Folioway â€" Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Folioway is a perfect pixel WordPress theme, not only its clean and elegant, it also comes with tons of features like amazing slider, unlimited colors, etc. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible and easy to use! It is just the best WordPress theme for your or your company’s work presentation! This is simple and clean and for sure one of my WordPress Portfolio Themes favorites.

Workspace â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Workspace is a feature-rich business / portfolio theme that perfect for the creative agency, freelancer or general business.

Volumes: Responsive Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Bold, beautiful, full of character and fully responsive â€" Volumes is a great asset to any creative freelancer or agency. An attractive showcase for you work packed full of features, a filterable portfolio, custom widgets, custom page templates and more.

Nemesis Clean Design For Creative Designer â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Nemesis is the Responsive WordPress theme built for creative freelance designer website. It comes with many cool features ex. Skin manager, Flexible portfolio contents (including stylish AJAX portfolio), customizable elements’s color, font and background image and patterns. There are also 100+ advanced shortcodes with Shortcode Generator support. You can also use 300+ custom fonts from Google Web Fonts.

Prospector Responsive theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Prospector is a fully featured Responsive theme. It’s perfect for portfolio websites. Excellent Sortable Portfolio displays all your portfolio items directly on the homepage. Each portfolio item has it’s own page with more details. It’s a fully loaded portfolio theme with tons of nice stuff you’ll love using. Precise and user friendly admin panel allows you to do a lot of customizations without knowing any HTML or CSS . Colors, images, fonts, widgets, sliders, portfolios, galleries,… everything can be customized and configured via admin panel.

CStar Design WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO | DEMO

A user interface management system with lots of features, including flexibility, speed. It has never been such an easy task to publish your website with your preferred colors. With it’s incredible skin editor, you will get your website exactly like the way you want. You have full freedom. You can edit all elements and backgrounds in the website. You can change the whole mood and concept of the website with 6 different background editor. You can either make it a serious company website, or change it to a fun and joyful website. Having a website for Restaurant, Furniture Shop, Rent a Car, Electronics, Hosting Company, Flowers Shop, Sports, Hospitals and for more sector, just depends on your imagination. You are one step away from your dream website.

Collection â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Collection is an eye-catching portfolio / showcase / gallery theme that built with of a lot of amazing features such as custom post types, post formats, etc

MediaBook â€" Multimedia WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Cool and a bit different portfolio WordPress theme with accordion style photo gallery.

RockWell â€" Portfolio & Blog WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

RockWell is a easy to use yet powerful theme with unique features. It is easy to customize and allows you to unleash your creativity. Fun, loud and versatile = that’s RockWell. Doesn’t matter if you are a photographer, business, blogger or a designer â€" this theme will suit all types.

Pipes, A Super-duper Customizable WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Pipes is a super-duper, customizable, responsive WordPress theme for your portfolio. Take the theme customizer for a whirl and see what you can create! Pipes uses some eye catching, stunning effects to wow your users. Try hovering over the left hand to see the 3D transition which offers your users another widget area. Functionality wise, you can create any kind of color scheme, unlimited amount of portfolios which include a bunch of different post formats and you have various post format options such as the ability to set a slider or stacked images within a gallery format for example. Pipes also supports all the major third party video providers such as YouTube and Vimeo but also includes a self hosted option too.

ELIST â€" Cool WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

eList is a versatile clean and simple Directory WordPress Theme. Using eList, you can create an online directory of any type, and allow your visitors to submit new listings from the front end. The theme also comes with eCommerce integration, allowing you to charge your visitors for new or featured listings.

Good Space â€" Responsive Minimal WP Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Good Space Good Space is a WordPress theme especially for creative agency. It’s very clean, minimal with modern design. This theme is also has a responsive ability. Moreover, it comes with tons of features. Including our page items that can be managed very easily via our awesome tool, ‘Page Builder’. Admin panel in this theme is a real feature rich. You can also create unlimited sidebar, choosing over 450 fonts or if you want to use your own, we provide a cufon uploader. You can also translate each elements to your language via this admin panel.

Boxed â€" Responsive Full Background Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Boxed is an elegant responsive portfolio/photo WordPress theme that was created so you can show off your work beautifully on the web. The theme has a unique left-sided navigation while keeping the site centered in the browser, an optional (you can have a normal static image instead) full-screen background image slider which can be set to show different images on the homepage, portfolio pages, blog pages, regular pages and even on a per post/page basis and overall a very clean and modern design that looks great no matter your browser size.

Duotive Three â€" Complete WordPress Portfolio theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

This is the ultimate portfolio theme with a very easy and powerful administration tool.

eVid Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

eVid is a theme designed for video bloggers. I have set it up to easily integrate videos from video hosts such as Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, MetaCafe, and so on. This theme does not have a native video player, but it does include a custom video interface with added “blogger-related” functions. This theme is only for sites that plan to showcase videos within their post pages. I have test the theme with all the most popular video hosts, but I expect that it will work with any website that offers a flash embed code.

Footage â€" A Photo & Video Production Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

With Footage as your website your viewer will never get bored and leave. This theme is a unique way to display your photography and supports all types of photo orientation so your photos will not get cutoff. If you are a photo/videographer and need a fresh new look for your website then this is the theme for you. And best of all Footage is AJAX enabled so your users will only have to reload when posting a comment.

Spark Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Spark is an amazing portfolio WordPress theme. Simple to use, it’s designed to display any kind of content and it’s perfect for every business. The theme is built on a solid framework and it’s HTML5 and CSS3 based.

New Horizon â€" Blog & Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

New Horizon â€" is perfect for design/fashion orientated blogs or for creative people who’s tired of regular thumbnails grids layouts.

Refined WP â€" Portfolio / Business WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Refined WP is a WordPress 3.2+ Ready Premium WordPress Theme specifically designed for corporate / business websites, portfolios, designer or agency websites etc. With a clean minimal design and numerous portfolio layout options it offers a lot of ways to display your portfolio / services and enables you to send a clear message.

Airlock: Portfolio WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Airlock is the project made for creative designers and interactive agencies. Simplicity, flexibility and attention to detail is the main asset of the design.

DK For Photography Creative Portfolio â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

DK is the Premium Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type, Unlimited Colors and Image Uploader etc.

Dandelion â€" Powerful Elegant WordPress Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Dandelion is a Powerful Premium WordPress Portfolio Theme. This theme provides all the main functionality you will need to present your products, work and yourself in an elegant and professional style. The Dandelion theme is highly flexible, so changing the color scheme is super simple and for the most parts you won’t need an image editor. The theme is best suited for any business, portfolio, photography and personal sites. This theme allows you to build your own custom skin just by selecting your favorite colors from the admin panel with a color picker. Additionally, there are 32 custom patterns that you can choose between for the body.

Gallery WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Gallery is a premium WordPress theme which can be used for many purposes, including a Photoblog, Portfolio, Personal Blog, Product Reviews, and more!

Duotive 2WO â€" All in One WordPress Portfolio Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Very flexible theme with many different color schemes and unique features. Different but still a top WordPress Portfolio Themes pick!

Dagda â€" Premium WordPress Theme MORE INFO / DEMO

Dagda is a clean business/portfolio theme for all of those who want something awesome in both usability, functionality and beauty. It’s packed with some awesome features such as events manager, font manager, sidebar manager, slider manager and much much more. Check the full feature list for this.

Striking Premium Corporate & Portfolio WP Theme â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Striking is an extremely powerful and flexible WordPress theme. The flexibility of its framework allows it to be tailored to a Blog, Portfolio, Creative, Business or almost any other kind of website one can imagine. The admin interface is easy enough for a beginner to grasp immediately but with every design element of Striking fully controllable so that if you are an experienced designer you can manipulate the design in any manner you see fit.

Free WordPress Portfolio Themes

Launch â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Launch is a sweet little theme for the personal blogger who likes to blog in style. Provides support for your own self-hosted video, audio, images, galleries, asides, links, quotes and of course good old standard posts.

Imbalance â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Imbalance is a great theme for an online-mag, blog or portfolio. User-friendly layout can attract new visitors and vibrant minimalistic design can easily fresh-up your project.

FontFolio â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

FontFolio Free WordPress Theme with a grid based layout. Design to showcase your typography portfolio. This theme was inspired by the works of Svetoslav Simov from FontFabric

Photo Theme Responsive â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Photo Theme Responsive is a WordPress Theme with mobile and tablet responsive design. Free Photo Theme is perfect solution for any professional photographer.

Touchfolio â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

“Touchfolio” is simple theme created with focus on content and providing great user experience on majority of desktop and mobile devices.

Portfolio Press â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Portfolio Press is an excellent theme for showcasing your photography, art, web sites, or other projects. It also works nicely as a regular blog site. An options panel is available for uploading logos and changing the layout.

Imbalance 2 â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Imbalance 2 turns you WordPress-based website to an attractive blog, portfolio or even online magazine. This free template designed in strict modern style with a minimalistic touch. Imbalance 2 can easily fresh up your web-magazine or blog. Due to modern flexible features and layout Imbalance 2 fits to almost any project and your visitors won’t remain indifferent.

Fotofolio â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Fotofolio Landscape is a WordPress theme specially designed for Visual Artist, Photographer, or any media designer, to show off their works.

Simple Grid Theme Responsive â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

Simple Grid Theme Responsive is a WordPress Theme with mobile and tablet responsive design. Grid like design Theme is perfect for any creative agency to showcase their portfolio. Inspired by the works of El-Studio creative graphic design studio.

The Unstandard â€" MORE INFO / DEMO

The Unstandard is a two-column WordPress theme featuring three widget enabled zones. The current 2.0 release is a complete re-write requiring WordPress 3.0 or better. Prior versions of the theme utilized a timthumb + custom fields setup to populate thumbnails for core pages. Thanks to the latest features offered by WordPress, assigning a thumbnail to a post is a simple two-step process.

Tips and guidance for choosing a WordPress portfolio theme

Before you choose a theme for your WordPress portfolio I recommend you review my advice below:

• Look for recent updates, support, ratings and comments: While we try our best to keep this article up to date there is always a risk that themes are suddenly not supported any more.
• Know your requirements: Start with making a list of portfolio features your solution will need to meet â€" and maybe make a simple sketch. This will make your life much easier once you start comparing the many available portfolio themes.
• Also you will not risk choosing a theme or plugin that will not work in the end. Read on to learn about what features you may not know that you need.
• Portfolio features in theme or plugin: When looking for a theme to set up a portfolio using WordPress there are actually two options. You can look for WordPress themes with build in portfolio page templates. This is a great option if you are able to find a theme with the right look and feel. If you have found a great simple WordPress theme that fits your business needs perfectly but it lacks on the portfolio capabilities you can often find plugins that easily extend WordPress with the ability to easily build and maintain galleries and portfolios.
• One or multiple portfolios and flexible placement? Some themes for building WordPress portfolios have limitations regarding where portfolios can be placed and how many can be added. This may be OK depending on your needs, but the portfolio layout is a powerful design element that can be inserted successfully on many pages, including the front page of a website. Portfolio solutions that allow developers to insert the portfolios using WordPress shortcodes is typically recommended for advanced users.
• Portfolio navigation options. Some portfolios option lightboxes with the image clicked, some take the user to a portfolio page, some allow for the developer to configure exactly what should be the action, e.g. opening an external link. Depending on what function the portfolio have within your WordPress site this may be one of the most important things to get right.
• Responsive portfolio or not: if you take mobile users serious you should consider to build a responsive portfolio. You see, portfolios are really hard to navigate in a small screen because they are typically set up with a fixed width. A responsive grid makes the portfolio columns adapt to the screen size.
• What data sources will be needed to fill the portfolio? Some solutions require portfolio elements to be added as custom post types where text and photos are added. Others can pull in regular posts and pages from WordPress and it can be really useful. Finally there are solutions that can create portfolio pages from external data sources.
• Do you have requirements for filtering and categorization? Many portfolios have filtering by tag built in making it simple for users to focus on elements that are important and relevant to them.
• Portfolio layouts have many shapes.While most portfolio themes for WordPress have several column layouts included (1,2,3,4 etc. columns) it is also important to consider if you need flexibility related to showing / hiding text titles, descriptions etc.

Author : Lars Vraa

Lars started tripwire magazine back in January 2009. He is really passionate about web design, web development, SEO, social media and loves to look into new technologies, techniques, tools etc. and to write articles for tripwire magazine readers.

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Tagged as: best wordpress portfolio themes, free portfolio themes, Portfolio, portfolio themes, premium portfolio themes, Wordpress, wordpress portfolio themes