Keeping it Real by Keeping it Clean
For media professionals, curating and cultivating your personal digital portfolio is essential in progressing your career. Strategic communicator, Jessie Rodulfo, and web designer, Ryan Heldenbrand, share what makes the most effective digital portfolios. Let’s walk through these web content and design tips that will help you construct the perfect site that showcases your best work.
In terms of web content, Jessie suggests presenting your most effective work. If you have represented a client, what part of your campaign yielded the most results?
For me, it was a small series of photos I took for St. Joseph’s local Dairy Queen franchise. The goal was to increase social media engagement and interaction. Between the photos that were taken, the influence to lead the audience to engage with the posts, and the researched timing of the posts yielded the highest traffic for the Dairy Queen’s Instagram account.
Be clear and concise about your purpose. Everything on your digital portfolio should consistently communicate your purpose, be it through image, video, text, or sound. Your audience should look at your work and not question the reason it has been curated.
When putting your website design into consideration, Ryan recommends testing the site’s readability and usability on a variety of screen types and sizes. As websites transition from desktop to handheld mobiles, the translation of the design can frequently become muddy. This is an important feature to maintain. You want your materials to look their best on all screens.
Some things to look for when testing these things across screen sizes are text and image layering as well as navigation. When the web design shifts content to accommodate screen sizes, oftentimes your carefully orchestrated desktop design ends up layered and difficult to read on a handheld screen. The same thing happens with the functional navigation features of a website. Your menus and tabs can relocate to unanticipated areas which will make moving around the website confusing and complicated. Thus, testing design translation is a very important part of your website design process.
While there are many other things to keep in consideration, these are a handful of tips to help create a thoughtful and intentional digital portfolio. Keeping a well-maintained, concise, and updated website is instrumental in progressing as a media professional.
