Ever since I started taking courses at UW with the Certificate of Technical Writing and Editing, I’ve been itching to continue working in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Program. And now I’ve finally applied to their Master’s Program. I thought I’d take a moment and share with you my entrance letter to the program.
Professional Portfolio
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Welcome to My Blog
We live in a tough time to be without a job right now. For two or three years now, I’ve been positioning myself and searching for a new career path. It’s not that I didn’t love my old one, but I had grown ready for a change and ready to take on more responsibility and a larger leadership role in my career. Six months ago, I made a monumental decision. I fully committed myself to this new career search, and formally resigned from my teaching position.
With the rise of powerful and flexible WYSIWYG web editors, you might ask the value of knowing HTML. Perhaps not, but we’ve all had the experience in Microsoft Word where a table just wouldn’t do what you wanted it to, or for the life of you, you couldn’t fix an odd page break. It was to my great dismay that Word eliminated the code revealing feature that would show you all the hidden formatting codes that were impacting your document. When something strange is happening, the best way to resolve it without starting over from scratch is to jump into the code. So, as a service to all those who know little to nothing about HTML, I’m going to give a framework for the basics of how HTML works and give you some resources to get you started learning this easy to navigate programming language.
So, you are ready to spiffy up your web portfolio with a new theme and some handy plugins, but there are too many out there to sift through. Let me take you through a few themes and plugins that will help make your web portfolio pop.
In today’s article, I want to explore some of the things you should and should not do when building and designing your web portfolio. The best way to get ideas for how to build your own web portfolio and what techniques will be effective is by looking at other’s sites and experimenting with their techniques in your own design. Eventually, over time, you will develop your own style and learn what design you like and what design turns you away.
So you’ve purchased your own little real estate on the web, you’ve installed WordPress, and you know how to add content to your web portfolio. So, what should you add? After exploring many different web portfolios, reading many articles, and constantly obsessing over my own portfolio, I’ve learned a lot about things that can be worth including in a web portfolio. If you’re not quite sure where to start, here are a ten ideas to get you started.
If you’re like me, after using a theme for a while, you’re going to find a font you don’t like or that the spacing between a header and the text is not quite right. People like us, we’re nitpickers. We want things to be just right, and we obsess over it until it is. Okay, maybe I’m giving a little bit too much away about myself, but if you’re the kind of person that feels comfortable, and perhaps even compelled to dig into the guts of things to understand how they work or to bend them to your will, this is the article for you. I’m going to talk to you about modifying themes, adding custom code, and even a little about creating your own WordPress themes.
Last week, I shared with you some tips on getting started with building your own Web Portfolio using WordPress. I mentioned during that article that there were many different themes and plugins to give your portfolio that added flare. This week, I’m going to go into more depth about the possibilities of extending WordPress.
Building a web portfolio can be an overwhelming experience, even for a technologically savvy user. Luckily for you, we are quickly approaching a golden age of web development. Every day there are more and more tools being created to take web development to the level of word processors and page layout software. Web development is no longer the sole demain of web developers. There are many solutions out there for those looking to build a web portfolio that is robust and easy to manage. WordPress is perhaps one of the fastest growing and best at balancing sophistication and usability.
I consider myself a layman’s web designer. I have skills and the ability to learn the tools to do more complex, code-based web design, but also enjoy the simplicity of a good GUI interface that allows designers to focus more on the design and less on the code.
That bridge of experiences and interests led to my breakdown of web development tools into three main categories: highly structured “what you see is what you get” (WSYWIG) tools, flexible WSYWIG tools with access to coding, and full coding tools. I’d like to talk about each of these categories and how you can use them to build your own web portfolio.