Web Portfolio Design

A step-by-step guide to creating your online portfolio

Portfolio by student Natasha Moloo

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.

Tuition:	~~$500 US~~
March Tuition reduction: Call Admissions for Special Course Pricing ( 800 258 4115 ) or use this form to get immediate details:
CEU Value:	1.5
APPLY NOW >	\| Question? CHAT LIVE NOW

Course Instructor(s):

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

Course content developed by Reinko Hallenga.

Requirements:

To take this course you'll need:

Computer with Internet connection (56 Kbps modem or faster).
Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks, or equivalent digital imaging program.
Adobe Dreamweaver, or equivalent Web page design program, or good HTML coding skills.
An account with a Web hosting service (free services are available).
Basic experience with the software programs required for this course and familiarity with uploading pages using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) programs.

Prerequisites:

The following courses can help you meet the above requirements:

5300 - Dreamweaver I

Course Objectives:

Students learn how to:

Develop an understanding of how to present 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 projects.
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.

Course 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.