Create a professional looking portfolio / promotional web site
Site should be located at something like yourname.com. There are no specific requirements for what the site must contain, rather it should be a reflection of what your goals are as a student / budding young professional about to enter the job market. If you aspire to be a graphic designer it should showcase your work. If you aspire to be in business it should showcase your credentials and exude professionalism. If you aspire to work in the field of communications it should be your own personal, web-hub showcasing elements of your personality. It should communicate to clients the type of work you like to do and are well suited for. Ultimately it’s only purpose is to help you get a job. It’s what you hope people will see first if they vet your name on google and it should complement (and possibly feature) your resume . There is no set number of pages that your site needs to be and this really should be dictated by the content.
What about WordPress? or bootstrap?
Yes and yes, you may use any technology at your disposal that you can implement on your web hosting platform with Godaddy. So if you want to use Wordress, log into cPannel and click the install WordPress button. You will have to enter some info but it should take less than 5 min. At that point you will wordpress installed on your website, now you can find or build a theme upload it via ftp. The simplest option here is to use a child theme, which is simply a set of styles that overwrite and builds on top of an existing theme. If you want full control you could start from scratch and build your own custom theme, however this is quit a bit of ground work to lay and a lot of things to wrap your head around. The trade off is, latter on it’s much easier to update and add content to your site. No need to get back into code. The site you are currently reading is Wordpress with a custom theme I built specially for this class, it also useless bootstrap (yes you can use both, to get started with that go here ). If you do want to work with WordPress you will need to download and install Mamp ( unless you want to work with command line and use OSX’s built in apache function… yep didn’t think so ). If you do want to go this route the good news everything you need is free! Also there are tons of resources out there to learn everything you will need to know to get through the process. I can point you in the direction of some great resources on lynda.com.
So you heard bootstrap is like the best thing ever, like having your own personal helper monkey that does your laundry, homework and responds to annoying clingy text messages from your mom? Well that may be at least partly true. I will talk about this in class and do a basic overview, however if you aren’t supper confident with the core concepts of CSS it may feel a bit overwhelming jumping into bootstrap. If you want to check it out the easiest way to get started is to go here. Click the blue button that says Bootstrap, choose the options bellow that you want and then click the Download button. Take the folder, drop it into your sites directory, laid it into brackets and then hit live preview. Once you see the results remind yourself “Yes this is real life” and start customizing / breaking stuff to see what is going on.
Or if that sounds like to much work just download this bootstrap-starter-kit and check out its contents. Just remember you’ve got to make it look original and make it your own.