Project #2: Web-Based Professional Portfolio

Scenario
You are a student at a prominent university in the Midwest, hoping to gain the attention of professionals in your field and/or to find a position that will showcase your experience, skills, and professional projects.

Prompt
Working individually, you should plan, design, and publish a Web-based portfolio that contains (at minimum) the following:

1. a webpage that visitors can use to get an overview of your portfolio and navigate through it;

2. a navigational system that is clear and easy to follow;

3. an appealing, professional design;

4. employment-related documents: a resume with hyperlinks, as well as a narrative, autobiographical hypertext, similar to an “about” page;

5. samples of your work (including the other projects from this course); and

6. any other work that would help represent your experiences and talents.

If you already have a website that displays some of your work, you will need to produce either a separate professional portfolio website or you may take the opportunity to redesign your site. Your portfolio should contain components that will encourage an interactive learning experience that is both appealing and informative for your audience.

Deliverables and Steps in the Process
1. Researching the Profession and Model Portfolios: In this step, you'll begin to investigate the types of positions you're likely to look for when you graduate and then find/discuss some professional portfolios of the people in those areas. You will collected 5 real job ads that you would be qualified for and a list of 5 digital portfolios that might be used as models/examples (ideally, these portfolios will be for people who occupy the types of positions listed in the job ads). In a professional memo to your instructor, you will list these jobs and explain how the portfolios serve as models. Be sure to include full citation/source information for the job ads and the model portfolios. This memo is due in class on Tuesday, September 30.

2. Audience and Site Design: In this step, you'll need to analyze the target audience for your website based on your research from Step 1. Using what you know about your audience's needs, you'll design a visual representation of your portfolio site, with titles of pages and descriptions of each's content. You should produce a cover memo that presents an analysis of the audience for your site, along with a site design, including the navigational system. This step is due on on Thursday, October 9.

3. Developing a Web Resume and Narrative Hypertext: Two of the most important electronic documents in your portfolio will be your web resume and your narrative hypertext. We will discuss examples of these in class. You'll need to begin with the resume portion and then develop the narrative hypertext. The narrative hypertext should consist of a couple of paragraphs about yourself with embedded hyperlinks. You should think of this hypertext narrative as a place to include background information about yourself that is not listed or is not readily apparent in your resume. It should have a professional tone and be written in grammatically and mechanically correct prose, but it should also provide a glimpse of your personality.Drafts of this work should be ready for peer review on Tuesday, October 21; this means that both the resume and the narrative hypertext need to be on the web and ready to be viewed before class starts.

Some examples of narrative hypertexts:

• David Blakesley
• Meg Hourihan
• Aaron Swartz

4. Site Design: In this step, you'll create the Web pages and navigational system for your portfolio. A prototype of your portfolio/site should be ready for peer review on Tuesday, October 28.

5. Usability Testing: Once your prototype has been revised according to peer comments, you'll learn how to conduct usability testing on your portfolio and on those of your peers. We will tentatively begin conducting usability testing in class on Thursday, October 30 (we may move this to later in the semester).

I will evaluate your portfolio on the basis of its professionalism, its overall design, the integrity of its information, and its use of multimedia components. I will evaluate the memos you produce for this project according to the following scale:

+ (excellent)
check+ (good)
check (adequate)
check– (not adequate)
– (failing-please rewrite)