Use WordPress for your Portfolio

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform, that gives anyone the ability to run and manage a website. But WordPress is not just limited to blogging. At it’s core, WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), and as such, can be used for any type of website. Many people are using WordPress as a base for their online portfolio. With WordPress’s robust features and ease of use, why not use it for your Portfolio?

Whatever you portfolio may be, WordPress is a great platform to work on. But how do I use something that’s geared towards blogging as a portfolio? Easy! Here are a few things to help get you started converting the powerful blogging platform into a powerful portfolio.

There are more WordPress themes out there than you can shake a stick at. Unfortunately, most are either not geared towards portfolio’s, or are just complete crap… the latter of which you’ll find a lot of. Picking a design is all about your own personal taste, and -more importantly- what kind of portfolio you are creating for. Here are several great themes that are specifically tailored for Portfolio’s.

If you want to design your site yourself, I still suggest downloading one of these templates to give yourself an idea on how create a template. Here’s also a great resource from WordPress on how to create your own theme: Theme Development. If you do use a pre-made theme, I strongly suggest to not use it ‘as is’ or ‘out of the box’. Edit it, tweak it, make it your own!

There are thousands of great plug-ins out there, and depending on what kind of portfolio you have, there’s some great ones just for you. What plug-ins you use greatly depends on your portfolio. If you’re a Video Producer, your plug-ins will different greatly from those of a Photographer.

Below are a few great general plug-ins, along with a few specific ones.

A few things to avoid when choosing your plugin’s:

Be sensible!

If you’re creating a portfolio, don’t add plugin’s that display your Netflix queue, daily fitness tip’s, of your lvl 70 Night Elf’s stats. Use common sense and only add things that will enhance your portfolio, not distract.

Plugin’s that specialize in displaying your followers (twitter).

For a personal site, this would be ok, but for a portfolio, it just seems in bad taste to flaunt your popularity (or lack thereof). You want your site to be about your work, not about how popular you are. Again, this comes down to personal taste, so if you want to show off your followers, go for it! ;-)

Plugin’s that add JavaScript library’s other than your default one.

Whether you’re a jQuery, MooTools, YUI, Prototype, or Dojo user, you want to use plugin’s have use your library, and not others. Not only doesn’t loading more than one library slow your page loading time, it can lead to some huge problems and error out all your JavaScript. If you find a great plugin that uses MooTools, but your theme uses jQuery, don’t use it! Chances are there is a jQuery equivalent out there. Always stick with one library.

Plugin’s that use their own design.

Too many plugin’s come with their own design (ie they have a .css file inserted into your template). This can be unwanted depending on your theme as it can stick out. It can end up looking like a widget to found and simply slapped on your site. Everything on your site should go together. If you do find a plugin that you love, but it has its own design, I suggest editing the plugin’s style to fit with your design.

On a side rant, every plugin that dumps a stylesheet into your theme should come with the option to not include it. That way you can design it yourself in your site’s stylesheet. There are some plugin’s out there that do this, and they are better for it.

A static homepage is as important to your portfolio as any other part of your site. It’s usually the page that most people land on. If poorly done, you’ll find no one will go any further. A great homepage should be able to convey who you are, and what you do in just a few sentences.

WordPress has a setting (found in Settings->Reading) that allows you to select a page to use as your homepage. However, if you want more control over your homepage, I suggest hard coding it into the page yourself with the is_front_page() function. For example:

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if (is_front_page()) {
  // Run code that display's your 5 most recent posts
}

A great homepage should have the following:

• A sentence or two about you, and what you do
• Examples of your work
• A clean, accessible, and easy to navigate menu

Some things to think about adding:

• Recent portfolio/blog/or whatever entries
• Recent testimonials
• Blurbs about how you approach your work

A great way to display pieces of your portfolio is through a ‘featured content’ type display. This can either be a single example of your recent work, or several examples of your work. It’s best not to overload your visitors at this point, so I suggest limiting your examples to 5 or less.

There are great plugin’s out there that allow you to do this. Featured Gallery is one of them. This is a great plugin that will rotate your recent work through a sleek MooTooles images viewer, with optional captions.

Ah Twitter. Yes, love it or hate it, but when if comes to your portfolio website, Twitter can be a great networking tool. It’s a great way for you to share content on your site, and a great way for other people to share it as well.

If you already have a Twitter account, I suggest opening a new one that you can use solely for your site. This is to avoid potential clients from linking to your twitter, and finding out everything about you. It’s best to keep the twitter account associated with your website professional.

There are hundreds of plugin’s out there to help you integrate twitter into your portfolio. But most of them are bad. Here are a few great Twitter WordPress plugin’s I would recommend:

There are many other plugin’s out there, and I suggest trying out what you feel is best for your site.

If you didn’t believe me before, here are some examples for portfolio’s out there that use WordPress.