Tips on Setting Up Your Portfolio Website

Posted November 22nd, 2010 / By Justin Younger in Resources, Tips

There are a couple schools of thought on how to set up your online portfolio as a new student. I am going to focus on the one that I feel is most effective for a student of motion graphics. That school of thought is: K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid). This idea should transcend into your daily life, but we can just keep it applicable to your portfolio for the sake of this article.

The idea works this way: do not build an elaborate website, make it tasteful, but stick to content. You do not want to allow yourself to be confused with a web designer (unless that’s your goal), but, as we all know, motion is a large enough field that you should be focusing on it alone. I don’t even think that’s far enough; I believe it goes one step further: all you want to show off is content. I am not alone in this thought either; there are plenty of services that are popping up around this idea. I am going to go into a couple of them here that I have found useful.

Free Services

We all know about Youtube, and its completely fine to post your work on it, but the community you really want to be a part of is Vimeo. It looks awesome, and has a nice set of features. Granted you will need to pay a yearly fee to get the HD, but doing so is quite worth it.

Behance

Behance.net is a free service for showing off your work, while being able to share it socially. The website has a snazzy look, but definitely centers around content.  You will need a Vimeo account along with this service to host your videos. Make sure you join in on the right fields, groups and use correct tags. [Ed. note - They now have a professional portfolio website builder called Prosite that, for $11 a month, gives you a very simple and wonderfully customizable portfolio.]

Content Management Systems

Wordpress.com/Wordpress.org

Wordpress is very well known, which is why I would recommend it out of all the CMS systems free for use. There is two ways to use it, host your own, or use their site. I would strongly recommend hosting your own so you can have your own web domain.  To begin with you need to have a little knowledge on how a CMS works. You will need to have a web hosting service, and a domain name, along with an FTP client [Cyberduck, Filezilla, etc]. There is plenty of documentation on wordpress and step by step tutorials on setting it up.

Indexhibit

By far my favorite of all CMS systems for artists of all kinds, this extremely simple layout steers clear of all the blogging direction that wordpress takes, and focuses on your visual work. The CMS system inside of Indexhibit is amazingly simple, while being robust enough to include an awesome stat tracker.  If you are on the fence about what to use, I would strongly suggest you take this one for a spin. It can be extensively customized should you want, but for the rest of us focusing on motion graphics in school on a deadline, this guy here meets all your needs. Don’t forget to send the developers a little donation; they definitely deserve it.

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This should give you a good starting platform for your website.  I just want to repeat myself one more time though: unless you are going for web design, don’t sweat the site too much. Keep it to the point and make sure the first thing anyone sees when they go to your page is your demo reel, front and center. If it comes down to it, make a plain html file and center your vimeo demo reel right in the middle of the screen along with your contact info below. You don’t want to distract your possible employer from seeing what he needs to see, because attention spans run short in this day and age and so do jobs. One more thing, unless you are a flash animator, NO FLASH!!!!!!!!!!

I think we will talk about demo reels next week, but until then share any thoughts below in the comments.

Hey guys! I like to play with 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time, but unlike Einstein, I only make motion art. So I spend most of my time expressing myself in some abstract, visual way, and I have really latched onto Motion Graphics. I am a newbie here in the field, but I have a passion for the work. Feel free to if you are also a newbie or someone just looking into this awesome form of art, I always enjoy helping people out.