How do you use portfolios?
Depending on the department, program, class, or intended professional use, your portfolio needs may vary. Typically, a portfolio is thought as of a collection of work; however, the type of work to be showcased may differ greatly based on discipline and purpose.
Some U.OSU themes may be better suited to your needs than others. Consider how you will use your portfolio and what kind of content it will contain before you select your theme.
Common Portfolio Uses and Suggested Strategies
While individual portfolio needs and site setup differs, there are three common portfolio types about which information is most frequently requested.
Visually-based Portfolios
- Theme: Orton
- Rationale: The Orton theme contains the WordPress Portfolio plugin, which uses projects and featured images to display visuals prominently. The portfolio page contains a list of projects. You can create individual projects, which function similarly to posts, to include a gallery of images or individual images. You might also use featured images within the projects to display that visual on the portfolio page or use the featured images within posts to display a slideshow of up to 10 featured posts on the portfolio template page.
- Strategy: Create a portfolio template page to display your work, removing the blog post page as your homepage and replacing it with the portfolio page. Display your images by creating a project for each collection and choosing a featured image that embodies the collection. Lastly, intentionally tag each post you create to generate a slideshow of featured posts that describe the "behind the scenes" process on the portfolio page.
Text-based Portfolios
- Theme: All themes will function well here. We recommend Oval to include a banner image or Oxley if additional visuals are desired.
- Rationale: Tags, categories and custom menus are available in all themes. For text-based portfolios, the use of tags and categories allow you to create a portfolio structure to suit your needs. Categories can be used to define the different collections of work within your site. Tags can be used to define the specific topic within the collection. You might create a custom menu in order to add a category or tag to the menu of your site, making it more easily accessible. See the Tagging and Categorizing Posts guide for instructions and further details on tags and categories.
- Strategy: Intentionally create a category for each collection of work you would like to highlight in your portfolio. Use tags to specify any necessary topics within the collection. You might then create a custom menu, adding your categories as navigation items. For example, you may wish to highlight your research process, articles or stories.
Mixed Visual and Text Portfolios
- Theme: Depending on the number of visuals intended in your portfolio, we recommend the Orton or Oxley theme.
- Rationale: Any theme choice may be a best fit here depending on your desired use of visuals.
- Strategy: If it is appropriate to include a featured image for each collection of work and for each post, then the strategy outlined for visually-based portfolios may be your best fit. Since projects function similarly to posts, you can include as much or as little text as you need. Alternatively, you might use the Oxley theme for which the posts are mostly text-based, but you would like to include additional featured images and visuals.
However, if your use of visuals is not consistent, the strategy outlined for text-based portfolios may be most appropriate, using Oxley to include featured images for the desired posts. By enabling the Jetpack plugin, you can create a gallery of images within your posts without requiring the Orton theme.