Web Portfolio Design
A step-by-step guide to creating your online portfolio
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 and publishing your own online portfolio.
Tuition: $450 US
Course Instructor(s):
Requirements:
- Computer with Internet connection (56 Kbps modem or faster).
- Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks, or equivalent digital imaging program.
- Adobe Dreamweaver, other Web page design program, and/or strong HTML and CSS 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:
Course Objectives:
- Incorporate research, personal style, career aspirations, and professional skill sets into a portfolio site plan.
- Develop formal and informal mood boards to guide the portfolio site design process.
- Apply best practice guidelines for layout, navigation, content selection, HTML and CSS coding, and file structure as they apply to portfolio Web sites.
- Select portfolio work samples that reflect the goals of the designer and the portfolio site.
- Effectively categorize work samples and apply navigation that allows for easy viewing of work samples.
- Write effective supporting text to accompany portfolio work samples.
- Create visual comps and polished drafts that guide development of the portfolio site pages.
- Apply basic techniques for polishing site content and planning for future site expansion.
- Use social media and blogging to build an interactive professional presence.
- Apply basic search engine optimization and tracking techniques to build and improve site traffic.
Course Outline
LESSON 1 Planning Your Portfolio
Your portfolio site is a reflection of your professional identity, and is often the first exposure a prospective client has to your work. In the first lecture, you will gain inspiration from professional designers and learn approaches for effective portfolio design and content selection. You'll conduct a personal assessment of your skills and goals and you will visualize your personal style through mood boards, all building up to creating your first page comps in the exercise.
LESSON 2 Creating Your Portfolio
Lecture Two focuses on selecting pieces of work and building the Web pages needed to showcase them. You will explore means of choosing and categorizing your best work samples, learn how to write effective supporting text, and learn how to prepare your image files for optimal viewing. You'll then turn your attention to page building, constructing HTML- and CSS-based pages from your comps and following Web standards and best practices. In the exercise, you'll select the right work for your portfolio and build out the complete first draft of your site.
LESSON 3 Finalizing and Promoting Your Portfolio
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, work samples, explanatory text, and design. Polishing these features into an optimal working portfolio site and delivering it to the world is what Lecture Three is all about. You'll learn how to add search engine optimization techniques, create a social media and blog presence, and track your site traffic. Your final exercise will challenge you to optimize your site, get feedback from others, troubleshoot any bugs, and publish to the Web.
Portfolio by student Natasha Moloo
Contact us | 800-258-4115 