Don’t just slop your clips up onto a WordPress.com theme (or some other platform) and call it a day. Customize your site so that you stand out from the competition - and, more importantly, don’t look like a digital idiot. http://msujrn400.wordpress.com/
Why WordPress?
- Lots of customizable themes
- Easy to use and easy to update
- Ability to move to your own URL
- When you get tired of what a free WordPress.com account can do for you, you can explore WordPress.org and all of its extended capabilities.
Follow Mindy McAdams’ 10 next steps to improve your WordPress blog
http://www.jtoolkit.com/wp/2010/10/10-next-steps-to-improve-your-wordpress-blog/
- Set the time zone
- Get rid of the default WordPress tagline
- Upload an avatar that follows your brand
- Create a real about page with good information about you
- Customize your blog’s sidebar. Do you really need the calendar? What about the Meta info? If you leave the default sidebars your site can easily look it was built by an amateur.
- Learn how to embed images
- Learn how to embed video. There’s no reason for someone to have to leave your site to watch your video work on YouTube or Vimeo.
- Please tell me your site is not called “<Insert your name>’s Blog.” If it is, you’re a lost cause.
- For goodness sake, please delete the “Hello, World!” post. And don’t forget about any default first comments. (In fact, should you even have comments turned on? See #11)
- Learn about tags and categories and USE THEM.
And our own #11: Be careful about comments. You may want to turn them off on everything - I mean, who wants to give someone the chance to say something bad about your work on your portfolio site? But it’s not just that people will say bad things … do you really want your dad posting this on your professional portfolio?
McAdams also has some info on Web hosting options.
And this note …
At its core, WordPress is a blogging platform. But it can be used to build very nice sites that are more static. If you choose to blog on your portfolio site, keep two things in mind:
- Be professional
- Post regularly. If you start blogging and then let it go stale on your portfolio site, what message does that send about your work?
Other Resources
WordPress is great, but there are other free site tools out there: http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/5-free-sites-to-help-journalists-build-an-online-portfolio_b12982
Some other things to think about for your digital portfolio
- Make sure you have a LinkedIn page. LinkedIn is perhaps the most boring social media site, but it’s also one of the most powerful when it comes to making meaningful professional connections.
- Printable PDF resume. You should include your resume in the regular text of your site, but have a “designed” PDF resume that you can link to from your site for download and printing. This PDF resume is also great to email out to potential employers.
- Assemble your social media accounts. Link to all of your social media accounts (be sure you’re actually active on those platforms so there will be something for potential employers to look at).
- Consider getting an about.me listing. It gives you one more hit on Google.
- A bit of caution about your clips: Don’t rely on your clips always being at their original URLs. Links change, and media organizations move content behind paywalls or into archives. Nothing looks worse on your professional portfolio that bad links to what are supposed to be your best work samples. So while links can be great and should be used, be sure that you’re regularly checking your work links (especially when you’re job hunting) - and store backups of your work in PDF format that you can upload if your link goes bad. (It’s easy to save any page as a PDF on a Mac, or take a screen capture.) Sometimes it’s even nice to have scans of your work from print copies so that editors can see how the whole package was presented.
Some Sharp Former Students
You’ll find all kinds of ways to improve upon these portfolios, but here are four students from a past semester who put together pretty good portfolios. These examples aren’t perfect in every respect, and don’t follow all of the suggestions noted above. But they’re a good start.
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