If you have a portfolio career...

[PatsysPyjamas]

Do you have different websites? Do you have different email sign-offs? My work is all sort of linked, has grown that way quite organically and makes perfect sense to me. But I'm not sure if linking it all together in one website makes me look brilliantly successful, or like I don't know what I want to be. The only need for a website is to say who I am, not for selling or anything.

Any advice gratefully received! Thanks.

I have a family email, a work email and a historic email
personally I'd get a generic email and have one website with several landing pages

Thanks TalkinPeace. I don't think I could cope with more than one work email address. And I think I agree that one website that I can use to showcase my work is probably best. I am just trying to work out how to present it all without looking messy.

between DH, myself and the kids, we have 11.
Thank goodness for Thunderbird which checks them all at once and sorts them for us.

I do have a separate email address for non-work, but do you mean 11 work email addresses? That sounds like hard work! I'll have to look into Thunderbird, never heard of it.

DH work
DH home
DH historic
Me work
Me home
Me historic
DS
DD
DH/me historic
me spare work
DH spare work

Thunderbird downloads the lot and lets us ten file where we want ...

I am slightly similar to you. 3 strands of work. I just have sections on my site for each.

I do have an e-news for my main focus and there is a link in my email footer which I remove if I contact somebody about my other lines of work, just because it won't be of relevance to the audience.

Assuming it is "just" you, then I wouldn't spend the time and effort on creating and maintaining additional sites.

I think these days 'you as the brand' is becoming more common and it just happens that you do x lines of work. It sounds like they are related, so logical enough to those who are looking, so I wouldn't change what you are doing.

Are the things in your portfolio completely unrelated or are they tangentially related (I.e. overlapping networks, related subject areas, competences etc...)

For your clients is knowing about another bit of your portfolio potentially relevant, or more like personal information?

So for example if your portfolio is translation, document layout and event organisation that would all go on one website.

If your portfolio is dog grooming, pet sitting and gardening that would be one website.

But translation and dog grooming should be two websites.

It is fine to make your email address [email protected] or something else generic and professional and use the same email address across your portfolio. Or have different email addresses but manage them through the same app. I have 4 email addresses but gmail checks them all at the same time.

I have got two separate websites. One (communications consultancy for medium-sized and bigger companies) has a link to the other (low-cost PR support for small businesses and not-for-profits) but not the other way round. They do have separate email addresses but both link back in to the same inbox.

Can't tell exactly if this works yet as I've only just started, but it seems logical to me!