What's the best way to create an online art portfolio?

If you want free and easy try a combination of Blogger and Picasa Web Albums.

I just use http://flickr.com, it has a nifty little app called “sets” where you can pictures into specific groups. For example, here is my portfolio. However, it’s not ALL of my work.

If you’re not a professional artist, flickr and deviantart are fine. I love flickr in particular because I can have the family member conversation update e-mail go much more smoothly…

“What are you up to right now?”
“School… aaaand Look! I’m liking drawing dinosaurs right now. Here are a few of my recent ones, Unca’ Steve.”

No matter which way you go be sure to put a COPYRIGHT and YOUR NAME clearly visible on any image you put into cyberspace. With the new Orphan Works bills pushing toward becoming law your work will be at risk of being used by others for profit.

DeviantArt is the way to go if you want a full showcase of your artworks. It has an active community too, if that is what you want. And Dog is so right! I almost sued a company for copyright© infringement (it used my photo for an advertising material without permission) but it was settled anyway. If you do not want your works stolen, do put your name somewhere in your work that people could hardly crop or edit. A watermark would do the job well.

If you are the sort who does not like a community for a portfolio, a blog would work. The good thing about blogs is that you can have custom templates. Some are even especially made for photo blogs, etc.

Or if you have the time, there’s nothing like a personal website for a portfolio. You’ll have full control of it and the whole site becomes an art! :)

Online portfolio! what problems?
There are thousand sites giving services like making site. For example WebsiteTemplates.bz you just contact them and in a short term you will have PROFESSIONALLY made site, with your pictures in it and so on…
If you do not wish to pay you may use free website templates and base on one of them you portfolio.

well there are a lot of free online portfolio sites out there, personally I like http://carbonmade.com because it looks clean and simple, it’s also free, you can sign up and upload more stuff. But there is also another one that’s in progress, http://www.spectacleapp.com/, it’s for students to showcase their portfolio, this one is like having your own website, but you don’t have to code anything, and to add new works is easy, all you have to do is upload images, no coding!

Actually. I’d like to update my answer. From the people who made spectacleapp, there is a new and improved online portfolio builder, called http://agoodportfolio.com/, it’s the same concept, it’s a way for students to showcase their portfolio, and it is like having your own website, but you don’t have to code anything.

But i think the best thing about it is how good it looks, i think it’s super well-designed, and customizable. You can choose from different layouts and then you can customize the page to look the way you want it to look, by uploading a logo, or by changing the fonts or colors, and all these you can do by clicking buttons and no coding, that’s pretty sweet! So it is like having your own portfolio site, you just dont have to code anything or even worry about buying a webhost. For non-web-savvy people like me, this is definitely a good thing.

The only thing is that it does cost $14, but hosting your own site with godaddy also cost money, but with A Good Portfolio you get the hosting and the website all in one stop.

There’s also http://www.brushd.com in the same line as carbonmade and agoodportfolio.