This is a prep stage for Task 8, your first graded Portfolio project. For this task, review all the info for Task 8 below. Do your best to achieve the first 1-12 “Essential Elements”. This will allow you to get feedback to improve for your Portfolio assignment. This is a graded task, but on a Task vs Project level. (See Syllabus for more info on grading).
Task 8 INFO:
Create a post for the class website that points to your own wordpress.com site. Use a featured image, and an image link to your portfolio URL . The image can be a screenshot of your portfolio, or a section of it. Then click on the image and use the link icon in the post editor to add the URL to your wordpress.com portfolio.
Picking the right theme is a critical first step. To do so, in your dashboard, under Appearance–>Themes, try to do a search for themes. You can get a quick preview of the theme before you decide to install it, but the preview won’t look like the theme if you haven’t got much content yet, or you haven’t make key design choices yet.
Essential Elements: (do all of these for Task 6)
- Photo or logo and tagline.
- All of your NMD 200 posts. You can just copy/paste the “text” from you told class post into the text tab of a new post on your own site.
- Coherent Main Navigation for NMD classes. Use Post categories to organize your menu, so for all NMD classes use the category “nmd200” then in the menu area, adda menu from “Categories”–> “nmd200” . Now you have a menu that will open to a page with all of your NMD 200 posts. You can do the same with other categories and with tags. Avoid using Pages–except for single use pages like “About ME” or “Contact Me” Most content should be in posts so you can organize it with categories and tags (Pages have neither).
- Alt Menu Navigation Create other genre-based categories (or tags) that will show off your work like : video, graphic design, code, etc Add these to any posts (a post can have many categories and tags, like a post could have “nmd200” and “video” as categories and show up in both category “pages”. Create a second menu to showcase a Genre based view of your materials, where course tiles dont show. Use this second “menu” in the footer or as a widget, or even as your main menu, with one of the other menu items being “Courses” with all your courses as submenus.
- About Me page which is a short narrative of where you come from, what matters to you, what your skills or goals are, and what your vision is for your future–you can interpret this loosely to make sense of your own narrative.
- A photo of you, possibly in about me page or home page.
- All your skills. This could be in the site design/categories or on the about page.
- Contact Page, for people to contact you. Try WPForms plug-in. How to add form.
- Your name prominently on front page
- Any jobs, internships or real work experience. This could be in the form of a resume.
- Remove or customize sidebar widgets. Some themes allow you to select “full width” for pages. posts or the whole site. Others require sidebars, which you can make more appealing than the standard default.
- Visual appeal: Use some image or graphic which will help your site stand out.
Extras:
- Media –like video, photos, etc–visuals make your site stand out
- Custom graphics
- Make it look like a custom portfolio, not a blog or course website.
- Allow access to your classwork, but bury that in a menu that allows you to highlight the genres or types of work or skill you want to show off.
- Make sure all entries have featured images, so they give good visual appeal to category/archive pages that list posts in order.
- Have enticing visual design that reflects your values & skills
A good source of tips and info–you can search this site: WPBeginner
