W03. Online Image Gallery

Now that our websites have been updated with our new themes / layouts, it is time to begin updating our content. Since we just finished documenting our work, we’ll start with our online galleries. Remember: “content is king.” While it’s important to get to know you as a person a little bit, your website is likely to just be scanned over quickly to get a sense of your talent. Your work displayed should be the most highlighted area on your site. Be really picky about what you put online. Your portfolio is not the place to put “everything you’ve made in the last few years”. Curate your work down to only the projects you’re most proud of. Once you’ve done that, send those projects off to your friends, family, and mentors. Ask them to be brutally honest with you and tell you what you should cut.

Make sure to show the types of projects you want to get hired for. If you want to get to do lettering, showcase it. If you don’t have any lettering work previously, do case studies and show those. If all you have on display is web design or branding, potential clients won’t have any idea what else you’re capable of. If you no longer want to do web design, pull all your web projects out of your portfolio.

  1. If you need to make changes to your documented images (or even if you have to retake them), start there. It will be much easier to start with good images rather than uploading poor images and then needing to update all of the images on the site.
  2. Once you have your 5–8 documentation images, determine how you would like to have them displayed on your website. There are many different options – some WordPress themes have their own custom image galleries. However, if you are using WordPress and are not entirely happy with your theme’s image gallery options, you can also find different gallery options by installing WordPress plugins. A plugin is software that changes or adds new functionality to your WordPress site. Do a Google search for wordpress image gallery plugin and you will find hundreds (or thousands) of different options for your site.
  3. After deciding on what your gallery should look like and how it should function, begin uploading images into your site.
  4. For each image, you will need the following information (all of this can be easily added):
    • Title
    • Medium
    • Dimensions
    • Year (artists only)
    • 1–2 sentence description (designers only)
  5. Make sure that all of your images are working correctly and have the above information available within the gallery. There will be no extensions on this assignment, and technical difficulties will not be an excuse for not having this project completed at the start of class.

GRADING: 10 pts (PASS / FAIL)

  • Set up your 5–8 images and descriptions in your website portfolio. At 6:00pm, I will open all of our sites and we will look at the image galleries on the projector.

///////// AUTOMATIC FAILURE

  • URL not working
  • Image gallery not functioning
  • Missing required content for the images
  • Fewer than 5 images in gallery
Credit: http://designvscancer.org/2014/07/04/freelancing-guide-week-4-portfolio-websites-social-media/