If you’re an artist or photographer and you haven’t got you work online yet, what’s holding you back? An online portfolio will instantly increase your exposure, without geographical constraints, helping you to get noticed, recognised and attract new clients! And it’s never been a better time to make the move to a ‘self-hosted’ website - here’s why.

Of course there are free ways to showcase your work online. You can use social media or a free service such as FolioHD. The problem with these platforms though, is that often once you've uploaded your photos to the site, they may become the property of the platform itself, or you are handing over rights for the platform to freely use the content. Registering your own domain name with hosting space ensures you’re in full control and ownership of your hard work - your data is kept in your own hosted space.

As opposed to free solutions, going self-hosted means you can address your site with your very own, custom domain name. And it’s an excellent time for creatives to find a unique domain name. In the last few weeks .photography, .photos, .gallery and .graphics have all launched, with other extensions like .art and .design launching in the near future. These new domains provide the opportunity to register and own catchy and relevant domain names that may otherwise already be taken for the .com or .co.uk equivolant. From the get go, a targeted domain name highlights exactly what your site is about; you wouldn't visit shop.art without expecting to find art for sale.

There are a range of apps that can be used to create a neat, professional portfolio in little time, without coding and technical expertise. WordPress, the world’s favourite CMS, has hundreds of quality themes to create a dynamic portfolio. With such a large WordPress community, themes, plugins and support for creatives is only set to grow further. Here’s a list of excellent WordPress portfolio themes. Amongst over 25 other applications available on the Cloud, Coppermine is a popular, dedicated photo gallery app.

Tsohost's Website Builder also has a number of fantastic templates, suitable for creating beautiful looking galleries. Complete ease of use is Website Builders real strength - a simple drag-and-drop build system, an array of widgets and an inbuilt image editor means you can literally create and publish a site in minutes. You don’t need a web developer!

There are many, many art, photography and creative communities on the web, and actively contributing to such a community is a great way to raise your profile and network with other artists. It’s wise to have a website to backup your participation, so others can explore your work and artistic background. Some popular communities include Photobucket and 1x.

Creating and publishing a professional portfolio that could attract buyers and clients has never been as easy, or affordable.

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