Create and update your WordPress.com portfolio, using all theists you have created so far for this class. Get an account–using your @maine.edu email address at WordPress.com and get a FREE website–they will choose a domain name for you (which will become the URL for your portfolio). Students in NMD 340 have just imported all of these posts from all of their NMD classes into their professional portfolio–so if you do this right it will pay off later.
Picking the right theme is a critical first step. If you are new to WordPress, I recommend the Cubic theme, which you can select from your portfolio Dashboard under Appearance–>theme. This theme will automatically create a grid for your NMD 200 posts with your featured images. You can also change your theme later and all your data (but not formatting) will be saved.
Essential Elements:
- Home page, About Me page, and Posts Page (this is the page you see in the cubic example above which would add your own posts/featured images). So you have to create an Additional Home page and About Me page.
- Photo or logo and tagline for Home page with Your name prominently on front page
- All of your NMD 200 posts: Tasks 1-6. You can just copy/paste the “text” from your class post into the text tab of a new post on your own wordpress.com portfolio site.
- Make sure all posts have featured images, so they give good visual appeal to category/archive pages that list posts in order, and category “nmd200”.
- About Me page 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. This can also be a bullet list in your About Me page.
- Coherent colors, coherent fonts and visual appeal: Use some image or graphic which will help your site stand out.
Extras:
- Navigation Menu for other NMD classes, using categories to organize them
- Genre categories /menu items for work like: video, graphic design, code, etc Note that any post can have multiple categories, so a NMD Task 3 could have “nmd200” and “graphics” as categories.
- Media –like video, photos, etc–visuals make your site stand out
- Contact Information, for people to contact you.
- 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.
A good source of tips and info–you can search this site: WPBeginner
