This page provides an outline of requirements for a useful, professional looking portfolio site using WordPress. See the screencast for more details on how to achieve these requirements in WordPress.
A conservative, simple theme is least likely to convey the wrong impression. TwentyEleven, TwentyTwelve, or Truly Minimal are all examples of good choices.
The top-level URL should be appropriate for a professional portfolio. For example, mine is: http://philipmjohnson.wordpress.com.
Define a custom menu containing the following menu items:
Create a page called “welcome” and set it as the static home page for your site. This page should include an inline photo and a short overview of your professional characteristics. Here is what one employer says about the contents of the welcome page:
As an employer, I need to be able to scan their homepage and know in a few seconds if I want to look further. “Hello, my name is…” and “Please feel free to click on the Contact link…” are superfluous and wasting the few precious words they have to sell themselves. If they don’t have enough work experience for a Professional Summary, then highlighting relevant areas they have an inordinate amount of experience in, demonstrated passions, or special achievements will also work. A lot of students I’m sure play online games. I liken this to their gamer’s profile, where with a quick glance you immediately know their DPS, HPS, gear, accomplishments, XP, character class, capabilities, etc. Another way to cut down on Homepage copy is break out common stats into bullets, like anticipated graduation date, degree they are working on, degree(s) already earned, thesis topic.
It is tempting to find any old photo of yourself and stick it on your home page. Resist this impulse. Instead, take the time to find a decent photo of yourself and/or get a friend to take a photo of you. The welcome page photo will be the most influential image at your site. It is the first impression visitors will form about you.
Think carefully about the impression you want to convey. You probably don’t want to appear dressed in a suit and tie. On the other hand, you probably don’t want a picture of you dancing at a rave and holding an adult beverage that was taken by a so-called friend and posted to Facebook.
Create a set of pages describing at least 2-3 projects with which you’ve been involved, one project per page. Each project page should contain at least 2-3 paragraphs of description, along with links to further information about the project. Here’s one example, and here is another example.
If at all possible, you should include a link to source code for your projects, such as a GitHub repository, or a SourceForge or Google Project Hosting site. You can even upload code from past courses to one of these sites to make it more easily accessible to employers. When you worked on a project with others, be sure to include the role that you played in the project and what artifacts you were responsible for producing. Also include your “lessons learned” and skills acquired from that project.
All project pages should be accessible under the “Projects” menu. See the screen cast for the technique used to make the “Project” menu item unselectable.
The menu should contain a menu item that is a direct link to your resume in PDF format. It should not be a link to a WordPress page containing a link to your resume. It should not be in Word format, nor should it be a Google Doc. It should be PDF.
While WordPress allows you to upload PDF files to your portfolio account, do not use this feature, because each file uploaded to WordPress has a unique URL (typically including the month and day that it was uploaded.) This means that when you update your resume, a new URL will be created to refer to that file. This is bad: you want to have a “stable” URL that always represents the most recent version of your resume. (That way, if someone bookmarks the current URL to your resume and retrieves it three months later, it will retrieve the most recent version of your resume.
One good alternative is to use DropBox to create “stable” URLs for your resume.
You must create an account on GitHub and provide a top-level link to your GitHub account (see my portfolio for an example).
Many developers now include links to their GitHub account in their resumes, and recruiters are increasingly using GitHub to screen applicants.
Create a page called “Contact” providing contact details. You do not need to provide your home address or cell phone number. Include a hyperlink to your TechHui and LinkedIn profile pages and to your email address. If you are a graduate student in our department, you can use the ICS Department as your physical postal address if your prefer. The Contact page does not need a visual image.
Create a menu item that links to a dynamically generated page containing your blog postings. See the screencast for more details. This is the only page that should contain a sidebar. The sidebar should contain navigational aids for your collection of posts, including “Recent Posts” and “Archive”.
Go to “Appearance / Widgets” and edit the Widgets on the “Main Sidebar” to set the widgets that appear on this page. You should remove widgets not related to postings, such as “Meta”.
Pages and postings should generally include some kind of image (or embedded video) for visual interest. Right-align the images for a more pleasing look, unless the image needs to be full-width in order for the reader to understand the image.
The images should not be gratuitous; they should provide useful additional information about the project. All pages (except the Postings page) should use the “Full-width Page Template, No Sidebar” option (if available). There is no reason to show the list of postings on any other page other than the postings page. In “Settings / General”:
In “Settings / Reading”:
In “Settings / Discussion”:
In “Settings / Sharing”:
The “Resume” navbar item should link to an up-to-date version of your resume as a pdf file. To post small snippets of source code, use the code or gist shortcodes. To post large code segments, upload the code to a cloud-based repository (GitHub, Google Project Hosting, SourceForge, etc) and provide a link. Delete the example posting, page, and comment created by WordPress.
This checklist summarizes the most important points from the above discussion: