Discussion: Making a great portfolio website
What medium (or media) are you going to be featuring prominently? Keep that in mind when choosing a template.
A portfolio website is basically an online resume. You’re selling yourself, so make sure you’re putting your best foot forward. Link to your various social media profiles, Vimeo/YouTube accounts, etc. You can even post your resume on there if you like. And write a good bio for your About page.
Some people choose to adopt a more formal tone, while others let a bit of their personality show through. Think about how you want to brand yourself.
Requirements for Final Portfolio and Reel
You’ll need at least three main pages on your site: a Video or Home page where we can view your projects, a Reel page, and an About page where you describe yourself and your work (names/sections can vary, but that’s the general idea). Some people put their contact info on this page, while others choose to have an entirely separate Contact page. Those of you who have work they’d like to showcase from other classes or personal projects are welcome to create a Photography or Audio page… or organize it entirely differently if there’s another system that works for you.
You’ll want a nice professional-looking headshot taken for your bio page, or a shot of you in action reporting. I recommend taking advantage of having your school cameras to do this. And please make sure you proofread. I want to see a sentence or short paragraph introducing each of your projects, on the portfolio site if the template allows space for it as well as on the Vimeo page where the video is hosted.
It is recommended but not required for you to link the website to your own domain name, because I don’t want to require any of you to pay a website subscription. Most of the site builders listed above have basic options that will allow you to host your site for free if you have a ____.wordpress.com or a ____.weebly.com address; often your site will show up with advertisements unless you upgrade (the monthly fee varies). It’s up to you whether or not it’s worth it at this stage to pay for the more polished, professional-looking website that a personalized domain will give you. A domain name will usually run you about $10 a year and it’s fairly simple to link your portfolio site to it by going into the settings and making a few changes. Let me know if you run into any difficulty here and I’ll be happy to help you.
Bearing in mind that since most of you don’t have a huge amount of material yet to work with, your reel doesn’t need to be very long. One minute long is plenty, and you should keep it under two minutes—basically you’re just taking your absolute best shots from everything you’ve ever filmed and cutting them together with music. Feel free to use this as an opportunity to showcase clips from old projects from past semesters as well.
Some examples of multimedia journalist websites:
https://www.keithlanephotography.com/
https://www.dannygoldjournalist.com/
A few popular website builder options:
Adobe Portfolio (free if you subscribe to an Adobe programs)
Squarespace (does not have a free version)
Buying a website domain:
Even if you don’t want to pay to subscribe to a site builder, it might be worth buying your preferred domain name sooner rather than later just to lock it down. (Depends on how common your name is.) Years ago it was somewhat more common to have some kind of creative website name, but that’s rare these days. I recommend using some version of your own name dot com because it will look the cleanest and most professional.
The process of linking a domain to a website varies slightly based on which ones you’re using, but if you are planning on doing this and having trouble following the instructions most sites provide on this, let me know and I can help walk you through it.