Creating Online Portfolios
Online Portfolios
Goals
- Learn the basic elements of an online portfolio
- Learn about two free tools that can be used to create a portfolio site
- Learn about tools that can be used to create multimedia portfolios
- Discuss privacy issues concerning online portfolios and social networking
Portfolio Elements
- Penn State University: Online Portfolios
Gather your best work that best represents who you are and where you're going - Dalhousie University: e-Portfolios
Answer the question "Who am I, anyway?".
Example Elements
- Resumé
- Personal, Educational, or professional statement
- Coursework
- Multimedia (Images, video, etc.)
- Contact information
- Bio
- LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter links
- Client list
- Awards
- Copyright statements
- Exhibition list, interviews (artists)
Basic Filesharing
Document creation tools
- Google Docs
- Google Docs workshop
- You can use Google Docs to create and share all types of "Office" document or upload documents you've created using other software and use Google Docs to put them online
File sharing sites
- Box.net (Box.net file)
- Dropbox.com (mainly for backups, but can be used for filesharing)
- More
WordPress
Blogs are typically websites made up of frequently updated news stories or "journal" entries. While there are many free blogging tools available, one tool in particular--WordPress--has enough flexibility to also be used to quickly build professional and easy to maintain portfolio sites.
- Well known-blogs
Creating a WordPress Blog
Set-up
- Visit http://wordpress.com/
- Click the orange "Get started here" button
- Choose a domain name for your blog (you can also buy domains through Wordpress)
- Check your e-mail to activate your blog (make sure you use an e-mail address that you can access)
Blog tasks
- Log-in to blog
- Set blog title and tagline ( Settings > General )
- Create a post ( Dashboard > Posts > New Post )
- Create a page ( Dashboard > Pages > Add New )
- Change theme ( Dashboard > Change Theme )
- Set Privacy and Discussion settings
Advanced
- Uploading images to WordPress
- Creating galleries in WordPress
- Adding other media to WordPress (especially videos)
- Create categories and categorize your posts
Multimedia Sites
There are popular free websites that can be used to host multimedia galleries. You can either link to these galleries from your portfolio or embed media from you galleires directly into your portfolio.
These sites not only let your host, organize, and display your work, they also help you network with other artists, fans, employers, and others who are interested in your work. These sites also have open APIs that make it easy to reuse and embed your work elsewhere on the web.
The sites listed below are some good starting points for putting multimedia work online. Besides being mature and stable, these services facilitate many ways to network and display your work.
Video
Images
- Free account: 200 images/100 MB bandwidth
- Pro account ($24.95/year): Unlimited
Social Networks
Facebook and Other Social Media
Services such as Facebook and LinkedIn have become extremely popular tools for connecting with friends, family, people you work with and emplyers. Using these tools you can post personal and profession information as well are get information about people and companies.
While these tools are great for making personal and professional connections, there are also many important privacy issues involved with using these and other social networking tools.
- Understand your privact settings (these can be difficult to understand and configure exactly how you like)
- Do not post sensitive or inappropriate content (only post what you'd like to see in the New York Times!)
- Unintended reach and use of your content
- Permanance and findability of what you post (even though you delete it, it's not "deleted")
- Employers will search social media
