Online Website
Web Portfolio Design

Andrea Hill, Ohio, built this online portfolio to attract prospective clients.

You're a designer, and you're good at designing. But design skills are one thing, and selling these skills is another story entirely. Suddenly, you'll find that you also have to be a marketer.

This course is a practical guide for designers who want to successfully present their work to potential clients via the Internet. You'll learn how to identify your strengths and weaknesses as a designer, selecting works that best showcase your talents.

Through feedback and critique, you'll be guided through the process of creating your own online portfolio. This course is strongly recommended to Web design certificate students, at the end of their program.

Instructor:
Bruce Bicknell is a writer, instructor, illustrator, animator, Web designer, video editor, and marketing pro ... get bio

Course Developer:
Reinko Hallenga is a designer who specializes information design and interactive design ... get bio

Develop an understanding of how to present their work to potential clients through the Internet.

Examine existing web portfolio sites to evaluate their strategy and goals

Develop an outline for their own portfolio site design project.

Review their skills, interests, and career aspirations and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Write persuasive and professional content describing their work to market themselves to potential clients.

Prepare digital work and digitize non-digital work for presentation on the Web.

Identify a structure for their portfolio Web site and decide on its main categories, creating a flowchart to indicate the site’s architecture.

Create mock-ups and design the main pages for a portfolio site: a home page, navigation page, and content page for artwork.

Apply basic techniques for optimizing their work for the Web.

Apply basic techniques for establishing a Web presence and getting traffic to their site.

Outline:

LESSON 1 Drawing Up a Personal Plan This first lesson focuses on improving the chances that you and your client will enjoy a healthy working relationship. All efforts are put towards improving the chances for a perfect match between the kind of work you want to do and what your client is looking for. In this lesson the foundation of your portfolio site is built by means of a personal master plan. The focus is on translating your personal strengths, in the form of a mission statement, into the actual design of your web site.

LESSON 2 Selecting and Presenting Your Work This lesson is about selecting pieces of work to present, and organizing them. By paying close attention to where you want to go and what your potential client is looking for you should be able to make a good selection. This lesson will provide you with some tools, such as categorization, visualization, navigation design and photographic techniques.

LESSON 3 Implementing Your Design At this point in the course you'll have a pretty clear idea of what your site will be like. You'll have decided upon your structure, choice of work, explanatory text and design. Translating these, the building blocks of your site, into an optimal working portfolio site is what this lesson is about. By the end of this lesson's exercises you will have a working portfolio site built around your inner strengths.

Tuition: $408 US