To all the hard working students out there, either just finishing summer semester classes or working to pay for the fall. I‘ve got to say that working on a portfolio takes much more time than one would ever guess!!!! (and maybe a little#*!*#) It is hard to describe what goes into such a project, as it is different for each designer. But to assist anyone who is where I was about six weeks ago, I am going to try. Maybe my findings will help you a bit. I compare putting together a portfolio to intending to clean out your sock drawer and 2/3’s into it you realize that your whole bedroom is gross and the project just grew into something much larger than you first anticipated. On the positive side the best thing to come from working on my site was to feel fully confident in the fact that I really can do all the programs that I presume to do on my resume. I say that because you revisit all of them in the process as well as learning about other handy things such as lightbox scripts for embedding movies and images and creative sharing communities such as Vimeo and CSS-TRICKS*.
After working on my resume for an internship in the fall, I started to plan my online portfolio. Knowing that I would not be able to use my school’s host site or domain after graduation, I decided to look around for a host site for my portfolio. There are so many hosts out there it is mind-boggling. Hosting Review.com is a fairly informative site to use as a starting point. This site reviews their top ten hosts and includes video to go over all the points they feel you should consider when making a choice, such as, free domains, unlimited space, online and phone support, and cost. Once I had narrowed my choices to three, I googled reviews on all three then sifted through the online opinions taking them all with a grain of salt. This process was helpful, but in the end I just flipped a coin and went with Blue Host. I am satisfied with them though I might caution you that when a site boasts unlimited space, there is probably a limit in the size of each file being uploaded for Blue Host it is 1G, which I can live with.
One last point on deciding upon a host that you might consider, is the speed that your portfolio site loads. Sometimes webhosts might be the cause of slow loading pages, but the structure of the site also makes a difference. Google Webmaster Central Blog lists some tools along with their links, that evaluate the speed of your site. Though I haven’t gotten to try any of these tools yet as I am still tweaking my site, it is something to think about.
When planning your portfolio, it is nice to see what is out there. It can give a jumpstart to your creativity. DESIGNM.AG features 101 Awesome Portfolio Sites and updates this feature with Folio Focus. This highlight offers many approaches to a portfolio, gives examples of structure and helps to establish what information is important to include.
Deciding on the flow of your site will influence what sort of CSS template you plan to use. I found several sites useful in deciding the structure of my site. One example of free CSS templates is in fact called Free CSS Templates. This site offers everything that you would need to create your site even images, though you would probably use your own images for a design portfolio. Before you begin coding, diagram your site on paper or in a program such as OmniGraffle; this will save you wasted time in mistakes later. I can only speak from experience, if you find that you have started down a dead end road, leave it and start again. When a design is not working, it will not get better no matter how many fixes you throw at it.
You are probably planning to include images, maybe video on your site. A clean and free program for embedding and viewing images is Visual Lightbox and for videos a wizard program called Video Lightbox. It might also be helpful to know that Vimeo, an online community for storing, showing and sharing videos, now offers HD with uploads of up to 1G which can be helpful for storing Flash and After Effects movies. Vimeo itself is free, but Vimeo HD has an annual charge.
Another handy site is a web design community curated by Chris Coyier called CSS-TRICKS*. This is a great source of information for code writing offering tutorials, forums, and downloads, a definite bookmark for anyone interested in web design.
I hope that this information will save you a few steps. This is a link to my site, I will be adding to it and changing it throughout my senior year, but I feel a weight has been lifted as I get one step closer to working in the real world.
