No one buys sight unseen. Customers want to thump the melon, smell the coffee, and squeeze the Charmin before they put it into their shopping cart. The same holds true for your creative clients. Before hiring you for advertising, design, copywriting, web development –or any kind of work– they want to see what you can do. Sometimes that’s trickier than it sounds.

That’s where Oozil comes to the rescue. Part of the long list of creative tools Oozil is providing to its members is a virtual portfolio. With practically limitless memory, this space is invaluable: not just as a portfolio, but also a gallery and resume in one that makes your work available for the whole world, without the cost normally associated with hosting your own.

If you don’t have a webpage of your own, you might want a quick lesson in what that entails outisde of Oozil. A simple Google search for “artist webpage” turns up a long list of ads posted by companies that want to relieve creative people of their hard-earned money, charging monthly fees for the design, the space, and the web hosting, with extra charges if you exceed their limits. The cost is often more than you would stand to make by selling your work.

Those aren’t the only fees you would incur if you try to host your own webpage. The domain name costs money too. How much money depends on how good the name is, and you could end up shelling out hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars if you want a catchy one. You can go cheap and purchase a site name like dog-carrots-art23.net (all you’ll get for a budget price) and cross your fingers that anyone will ever find you.

But you don’t have to do any of that. Oozil has done the work for you. They’ve secured the space, the tools, and a catchy name that everyone will remember. You’ll have no need to pound the pavement in your own town with a bulging briefcase full of sample work. You can tell anyone, anywhere: “I’m on Oozil.”

For Oozil members who are clients, this collection of portfolios will be a one-stop shop for finding the people to fulfill your creative needs. Why spend hours flipping through resumes or doing online searches that yield nothing, when you could stop by Oozil and actually see what your potential hiree can do for you?

Oozil is all about connection. You could have the swankiest portfolio in town, but what if no one ever calls to see it? You could be offering a plum advertising assignment, but what if no applicants fit your needs? The virtual portfolio eliminates the hassle as well as the worry, and connects creatives to clients in a way that requires less work for both of them.

Imagine if you had an agent that worked for you, finding the right jobs (or hirees, if you’re a client) for you while you went about your everyday business.

Now stop imagining, because you have one already. Meet Oozil.

by Elizabeth Kelly

Tags: jobs, tools, virtual portfolio

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Oozil Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response