Introduction
The pupose of an online portfolio is to enable you to point future employers or clients to one single site on the web where they can make a preliminary assessment of you.
A portfolio should therefore be a combination of a history of your work (showing what you can do), some essays, reviews or writing (showing what you think), and a blog (showing what you notice). In addition you might want to include photographs and links that aim to give a wider picture of what you are like.
What does “a history of your work” mean, exactly? That depends on what you feel your work ii going to be; in other words, what your ambitions are. If you want to be a film director then the display of your work, as far as your portfolio is concerned, might concentrate on movies, scripts, treatments. If you want to be a sound engineer, then your portfolio might contain a lot of sound samples. And so on.
You will need to find (or create) a WordPress theme that allows you to display yourself as clearly and stylishly as possible. The look and feel of the site will be as important as the actual content in determining the first impression that users get. If the site looks messy, or is difficult to naviagte, potential clients or employers may not even bother to dig into the site to find the content that you know is fantastic.
What makes a site clear and stylish? There is no one answer to this, because it depends on what the purpose od the site is; what contents the site has to display; and how that content should be ordered and prioritised. In other words, you need to know what you want to achieve before you can achieve it.
Seven Examples
The web is dynamic. Your life moves on. Therefore we should expect to find that portfolios on the web differ from printed protfolios in that they reflect this movement. This first site is primarily a portfolio, although it also has sections that change regularly:
Stephen C Bronack: professor of education at Clemson University.
The following sites have been created by people who primarily deal in ideas and words. Their sites are therefore text-oritented, with the visuals acting as decoration and illustration:
Marc Canter, programmer, web philosopher and open identity campaigner;
Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer, editor of Boing Boing, and Creative Commons evangelist;
456 Berea Street, the site of Roger Johansson, Swedish web designer.
The final theree sites were created by (or for) people whose work is primarily visually based, as comic book artist, painter, and photographer.
Scott McCloud, cartoonist and author of Understanding Comics;
David Hockney, British painter;
Norman Seeff, fashion and rock music photographer.
You may not like all of these sites, or feel that they are successful in what they are trying to achieve. That is not the point. They represent a range of approaches, and understanding why they look like they do should help you focus more clearly on how you need your site to look.
Opening moves
Start by listing the things that you think are important about you as a person who wants to do whatever it is you want to do. What would you have to tell people to convince them to give you a chance? What do you have to show them that would convince them? What else are you likely to produce to add to this?
When you have a list of possible ingredients for the site, then prioritise them. What should people see first? Why?
When you have done this, think about colours, patterns and your own personal visual preferences. Do you like green? Does yellow make you sick? Do you like formal, box-like designs in the magazines you read, or do you like hand-made approaches?
After you can answer these questions, then you are in a position to look for a WordPress theme, because you will have a preliminary idea of what you should be looking for, and what you should probably be avoiding. WordPress has a large gallery of semi-official themes that you can access directly from the Administration Panel, or on the web at the official theme site.
If you cannot find what you are looking for there, then there are plenty of other sources. Here are some starting points. You can find others by googling something like “wordpress themes free” plus any other word that will further limit the results.
Looking farther afield
1. Videographer: http://www.zoomstart.com/videographer-wordpress-theme/
2. The Unstandard: http://5thirtyone.com/the-unstandard
3. Viewport: http://newwpthemes.net/viewport-free-wordpress-theme/
4. 20 photoblogging themes: http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/05/10/21-premium-like-free-photoblog-themes-for-wordpress.html
5. 14 photographers’ themes: http://www.justskins.com/wordpress/wordpress-themes-photoblogs/565
6. Free video theme: http://foxinni.com/my-themes/video-wordpress-theme/
7. Clear – a writer’s theme: http://clear.kera.la/2009/12/a-wonderful-theme-for-writers/
8. 100 Free themes from Smashing: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/
Things to consider
Once you have found a couple of themes that might be suitable then you need to test them. If they are not available through the Administration Panel then you will need to upload them using an ftp program like Filezilla, which is well documented in the project’s wiki. Adding a new theme is a very simple drop and drag operation.
However, before you make a final choice of theme, you need to have some material ready to test it. You cannot, for example, see if a photoblogging theme will work for you if you do not have a set of photographs ready to test it with. What looks good with two example photographs may prove to be useless for you once you have added another twenty.
If you have a media-intensive portfolio in mind, then you should consider where you intend storing the movies, sounds, slideshows, or photographs. There are two approaches to this. You can store them inside your WordPress installation, by uploading them through the Administration Panel, or you can store them on YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr, or a similar site, and link to them from you own site. Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages.
You should also look at how you are expected to add media to your site using the theme you are interested in; and what the theme requires in terms of administration.
Fine-tuning with plug-ins
Finally, along with themes, WordPress has an enormous number of addons, or plug-ins. These can also be found and added directly from the Administration Panel. You can also see a list of all the official and semi-official plug-ins at the WordPress.org site.
If you cannot find a theme that does exactly what you want, then you can almost certainly customise an existing theme using a range of plug-ins.
You will definitely need to add at least a couple of plug-ins: you will need a strategy for backing up your site, and for dealing with the never-ending plague of spam you will start receiving as comments and trackbacks.