Website builder for freelancers

Most freelance websites are a portfolio of things the freelancer is no longer interested in doing, plus a contact form nobody uses. They get built during a quiet month, then abandoned when work picks up, and they are three roles out of date by the time anyone important reads them.

The fix is not more design. It is a site small enough that keeping it current takes twenty minutes, and specific enough that the right client recognises themselves in it. Siteglade builds that from a description, and updating it later is another sentence in the same chat.

This page is about what to put on a freelance site, what to leave off, and how to describe your practice so the first generation is close enough to ship.

A freelance site has one job

The job is to make the next good client send you an email. Not to impress your peers, not to document your career, not to demonstrate that you can build a website. Every element either moves someone closer to contacting you or it is taking up space.

That means the hardest editing decision is what to remove. The internship work, the client whose brand you now dislike, the three-year-old redesign that was compromised by committee. Anything you would not want to be hired to repeat should not be on the site, because the work you show is the work you get asked for.

It also means the contact route should be embarrassingly obvious. An email address written out in full, in the header or the footer of every page, beats a form for most freelance work, because people want to attach a brief and copy in a colleague. Add a form if you like, but do not make it the only door.

• Three to five pieces of work, chosen for the direction you want, not for chronology.
• A one-sentence description of what you do and who you do it for, above the fold.
• Your actual email address, written out, not hidden behind a widget.
• A current availability line, because it answers the question every client is holding.

Case studies beat a list of skills

A skills list is unfalsifiable and every freelancer has one, so it carries almost no information. A case study is specific, which makes it credible, and it lets a prospective client picture you working on their problem instead of assessing you against a checklist.

The structure that works is boringly consistent: the situation the client was in, what they asked for, what you actually did and why, what changed, and what you would do differently. Four hundred words is plenty. The last part matters more than people expect, because a freelancer who can describe a tradeoff sounds like someone who has made decisions rather than followed instructions.

If your work is under NDA, write the shape of it without naming the client. A paragraph about redesigning onboarding for a mid-sized fintech is more useful than a logo you are not allowed to explain. If you can only show a fragment, show the fragment and describe the rest.

• Context, brief, decisions, outcome, hindsight. In that order.
• Name the constraint you worked under, because that is what makes the work legible.
• Include process artefacts only where they explain a decision.
• Say what your role was when the work was collaborative. Vagueness reads as overclaiming.

Rates, availability and the page you are avoiding

Publishing something about money is the single highest-leverage change most freelance sites can make, and it is the one people avoid hardest. You do not have to publish a rate card. A starting figure, a typical project range or a minimum engagement size is enough to filter out the enquiries that were never going to convert.

The fear is that a number scares off a client who would have paid more. In practice the bigger cost is the hours spent on calls with people whose budget was a tenth of yours, and those calls happen precisely because the site said nothing.

Availability is the other half. A single line saying which month you are taking work from does more for urgency than any design flourish, and it is the easiest thing in the world to keep current when updating means typing one sentence into the chat and republishing.

Ship it in an evening, then keep it alive

The realistic path is one focused evening, not a project. Generate the structure, drop in three pieces of work, write the about paragraph properly, publish. A live site with three case studies beats a perfect one that exists as a half-finished draft.

Publishing is available on every plan, including Free, which deploys a real site that keeps a Siteglade badge. That is enough to have something at a real URL the same night. Removing the badge, connecting a custom domain and exporting to GitHub come with Pro.

Keeping it alive is the part that pays off. When a project wraps, add it while the details are fresh. Because the site is a real project you talk to in plain language, adding a case study is one message plus a couple of images, and the preview shows you the result before you publish. That is a low enough bar that it might actually happen.

• Evening one: structure, three case studies, about, contact, publish.
• After each project: one message adding the new work, five minutes.
• Every quarter: remove the weakest piece rather than only adding.
• Update the availability line whenever it changes, even if nothing else does.

The prompt that produces a usable freelance site

Describe your practice the way you would describe it to a friend introducing you to a client. Discipline, the kind of clients, the kind of problems, and the impression you want the site to leave.

For example: 'Build a four-page site for a freelance product designer working with early-stage B2B software companies in Europe. Calm and confident rather than flashy: off-white background, near-black text, one accent colour, a single grotesk typeface at three sizes, wide margins. Pages: home, work, about, contact. Home has a one-sentence positioning statement, a line saying I am taking new projects from October, three case study cards, and my email address in the header. The work page lists case studies with a title, client type, a two-line summary and a cover image, each linking to its own detail page with sections for context, brief, decisions, outcome and hindsight. About has a photograph, three paragraphs and a short list of previous employers. Contact states a typical project size of 8,000 euros and up and shows my email as plain text. No carousel, no testimonials section.'

Note the last sentence. Telling the agent what not to build is as useful as telling it what to build, and it stops generic sections from appearing where you have nothing honest to put in them. Once the structure is right, click elements directly in the preview to adjust type sizes and spacing rather than describing every tweak.

Owning the code, the domain and the analytics

A freelance site should not be something you can be locked out of. What Siteglade generates is a real project, readable and editable in the built-in Monaco editor with a file explorer next to the preview.

On Pro and Max you can push the whole project to your own GitHub repository through an OAuth flow, which for most freelancers is the export that matters. Max adds a temporary repository access token, valid for an hour, with git clone access through a built-in git server. That is a meaningful difference from a builder where the output only ever exists inside the tool.

Custom domains are on Pro and Max: connect one you already own, with DNS records generated for you and verification handled automatically, or check availability at registrar cost through Cloudflare Registrar. Purchases are handed off to a third-party registrar checkout, so Siteglade is never the merchant of record on your domain.

Analytics on Pro and Max give you sessions, page views, sources and devices for the published site. For a freelancer the useful signal is usually referral sources: knowing that most enquiries arrive from one particular link tells you where to spend your limited promotion effort.

Last updated: 2026-08-16