Creating an Online Portfolio

March 24, 2000 - This week’s topic is part of my ongoing quest to get everyone who comes through this college to try, at least once, to use their ISU-given right to web space for a practical purpose.

Being able to create a web page/site is a skill that is in increasing demand in this time of ever-increasing e-commerce, e-solutions, and e-everything. Being able to create web pages may save you from having a job where your main phrase is "Would you like fries with that?" while waiting for a real job. In fact, you may like it so much that it becomes your ticket to a real job that you actually like!

One way to develop your web design/HTML writing abilities while creating something immensely practical, is to create an online portfolio. First off, if you haven’t signed up for your web account, you’ll need to follow these directions. It’s a fairly painless process, and when you are done, you get a nicely large space to work with compared to commercial web providers or free-space providers. This article will cover more the design and management issues rather than the exact HTML involved, and will give you an idea of how to organize your page and the logistics related to delivering your graphics over the web.

Here are several issues to keep in mind when designing your online portfolio.

First of all, how much content do you want to display? This will determine the organization of your individual pages. For example, if you have very few images, you can have a larger thumbnail images and still keep load times fairly fast. If you have a lot of images, you will need to make smaller thumbnails and show more on a page. You should also keep in mind that QUALITY is far more important than QUANTITY.

If you stop to think about it, this will be extremely clear. If a potential employer is getting online (which costs money) to look at your portfolio, you want things to look good and load quickly. You don’t want to waste space with anything less than your best (highly obvious). Showing consideration for your viewers is always a good idea.

Create thumbnail copies of your images using Photoshop and link to the larger versions. Do not use the image size attributes to resize an image to create a thumbnail. If you use the image size attributes to create a thumbnail image, you’ve defeated the purpose of having a thumbnail. The purpose of a thumbnail is to allow a quick preview of your images and to allow your viewers to choose which images they’d like to view full-size.

Secondly, you want your site to look good. Web design has come a long (llllooooongggg) way from the rainbow-divider, animated construction icon , paper-texture, animated-letter gif, all-one-page concoctions of 1996-1998. Through a good understanding of design, you can make HTML do good things. Keep your design clean and well organized. Just because it is fairly easy to publish online doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take the same care and thought as you would creating a publication for class or a client. Clean design translates into FAST design. Understand the benefits and limitations of the types of images you use. Know when to use a JPEG and when a GIF might be more appropriate.

Finally, you want your site to be well organized, with logical and consistent navigation. Your viewers should be able to find what they are looking for on your site. Don’t make areas hard too get to, or change the look and placement of navigation from page to page. Be clear about what button goes where. An interface to "explore" may be considered a trendy thing to do, but have you ever tried to actually use one of those trendy navigation gadgets? I don’t want to have to roll my mouse over every button to see what the label is and where it goes. You especially do not want to do this to potential employers.

The end goal of the online portfolio is to get your work out there and accessible to potential employers (i.e. those people who will want to give you money). You want them to be able to find what they need as quickly and comfortably as possible. Trust me, do you want to be remembered as the candidate whose images were hard to find, were slow to load, and showed a lack of knowledge of how the Web works? Or do you want to be the one who presented an easy to use, well planned online portfolio with excellent images? You decide.

–J

Jennifer Nieland is the lab coordinator for the College of the Design student computer labs and is dedicated to stamping out the existence of those nasty rainbow dividers (see below).