If you have a portfolio of designs, you may be considering showcasing them on your website. There are a couple of different ways you can do this so today we are going to look at the pros and cons of using a password protected page on your website for your pattern designs.

The Pros and Cons of a Password Protected Pattern Page

Having your designs on your website is really a great way of people being able to quickly and easily see the sort of designs that you create and sort of work you do and therefore they can quickly see if they would like to work with you. There are two different ways you can showcase way and it’s completely up to you which you feel more comfortable doing.

Public Portfolio Page

The first way is you can have all of your designs in your portfolio on a public page. This means that anyone that arrives at your website will be able to access and look at your designs freely. If a potential client was interested, then they would need to contact you. If you choose this method, then it allows more people to see your designs more readily which also means you don’t have a contact list for who has seen them.

Password Protected Portfolio Page

The other option is to have two different pages set up on your website. The first will be a public change where you will have a small sample of your designs. You should select designs that give a really good idea of the sort of designs that you create. The rest of your collection would be behind a password protected page so a client would have to contact you and request the password in order to access that page.

The pros of doing this is that first of all, you’ll be able to know who is seeing your design collection because they will have to contact you and therefore you’ll have their email address so this protects your designs a little bit in terms of copyright because it protects your designs from just anyone being able to see them.

But second of all, because the client will need to give you their email address to access your collection, you will have a way of being able to follow up those clients as to whether they are interested or not in any of your designs. Also when you add new designs to your collection, you can email them and let them. So this gives you a way of building a client list which can be great for future sales and marketing of your designs.

Although there is no right or wrong in which way you go, personally I like to have my designs behind a password protected page.