Thursday, November 18, 2010

Project Two :: Your Digital Portfolio

description

Conceive, design, and begin building a personal portfolio website. Your focus will be just one of a large number of possibilities, the main 3 being:

  • investigating and finding a portfolio service
  • altering a blog style site
  • building a site from scratch


Your direction will be set by your ability and goals for a portfolio site and will be unique to each student. Those with the technical ability and need can investigate more experimental directions.



Domain: Decide what to call your online portfolio. 

  • A domain will cost you about $10 a year, but is sometimes rolled into the cost of hosting. 
  • Your name? www.eppelheimer.com
  • A variation of your name? theepp.com
  • Your name with a design bent? eppelheimergraphicdesign.com
  • Something completely different, but design related? designismytruelove.com
Use godaddy or networksolutions to see what names are available.

Hosting: Research hosting services 
  • Make sure you get a service that uses Linux, not Windows. 
  • View comparative services here
  • Recommendations from Wordpress
  • Marty uses aplus
  • I use Lunarpages
  • Huevia is a new hosting service to check out (great customer service!)

All Inclusive: Research options
Some services offer hosting (still need domain) and a beginning template

Flexible templates: Research options
These need hosting and domains
  • Indexexhibit example site: http://www.carlmole.co.uk/
  • Wordpress example site: http://estudiointerlinea.com/

In class today 
1. Review the other section's Find + Share!
2. Go to the Current Perspectives Lecture

Homework 
  1. Find three great portfolio sites to share with class, post to Portfolio Find + Share
  2. Propose 3 naming options that are available.
  3. Propose a system for use. Ex: wordpress, domain purchased on godaddy, hosted on Huevia.
  4. Begin making a list of your work, and brainstorm ways of categorizing it, ex: timeline, media type, type of design problem, etc.
  5. Working within your system, sketch (by hand) 3 categorization and navigation ideas. Show three or four levels of interaction,
    ex: homepage > portfolio > strategy > project
    ex: homepage > writing > article
  6. Try one of the portfolio pay services (use the free trials) to build a quick "site". Don't spend a lot of time with this.
  7. Post any reviews or suggestions to this post after researching.

*do not purchase anything just yet

4 comments:

  1. A few words on Indexhibit...

    I tried this service earlier this year, and it was very difficult to get it started, you really have to know what you are doing. It requires a lot of knowledge about your server space, and can be complex due to the number of places where you have a chance to fuck it up. Getting your server space connected to the Indexhibit online hub can be tricky.

    Anyway, once I did get it to work on my personal website, (I use lunarpages for my hosting/server space and godaddy for my domain name) I decided I really didn't like the format, and it is actually quite difficult to customize the website in a unique way. It does however function well as a simple navigation format, once you get started. Also, they have a few nice formats for displaying a gallery of your work.

    If you want to see what is working for people and what is not, I found the forum for Indexhibit really helpful:
    http://www.indexhibit.org/forum/

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  4. FIND + SHARE

    http://www.adceurope.org/
    More advanced than I think I am capable of, or so it looks, but I like the drawers. They all end up being open if you open them all.


    http://www.svenstuckenschmidt.de/
    I like the never ending display of work. Easy to view, minimal information. Links on top that jump to the bottom.


    http://www.lifterbaron.com/
    I like the layout and the simple windows of what the work looks like. The navigation is kinda of interesting living at the top.

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