Portfolios
What is a Portfolio?
Put simply, a portfolio is a collection of work, achievements, projects, and anything else that you might want to show off to the world. Some might think portfolios are only linked to art, but that’s only half the picture. People who work in stocks have their own “stock portfolios” that contain all of the stocks they follow; some athletes keep a highlight reel, which is just a portfolio of videos showing off their best moves. The uses for a portfolio are endless, and the more creative & engaging it is the better impact it will have on those who are looking at it.
For you, as a high-school student, your portfolios might start off bare. Unless you’ve been actively involved in a program for a good amount of years, the amount of content you have available for a portfolio might be limited. That’s perfectly fine. The purpose of this class is to get you started so that if you don’t have all that much to show off, you can begin working to compile things you want to show off.
This doesn’t have to just be about getting a job in your dream career field. Sometimes people keep portfolios entirely to themselves, so they can easily look back at all of the progress you’ve made in your skill-building journey. One of the most common adaptations of portfolios in the modern world is the use of social media platforms. The line between journaling and building a portfolio has blurred; some people prefer to keep an Instagram account or YouTube channel as apposed to a traditional website. This is also perfectly fine; but let’s think statistics. Due to how easy it is to open and start a page like an Instagram account, how many people have one? Don’t we all have so many accounts, that we sometimes have to make burner or fake accounts just to keep our content divided?
One of the best parts about having a portfolio is being able to stand apart from the crowd. Again, creativity is king; the more eye-catching and engaging your portfolio is the more likely you are to get noticed, and have people continue to care and seek out your work, whatever it is that you do. Well, how is it that we’re going to build out our own portfolios this year? Websites.
Online Portfolios as a Web page
Building websites is a somewhat dying art. Now more than ever, there’s an influx of website builders you can use for next to nothing, even sometimes free, to host your own work. Since this process has been so heavily streamlined, the artistic aspect of this has been lost. So much so, that when we see someone has a website, part of us goes, “Why?” What’s the point in having a website when you can just check my Instagram page?
Well, this is where we move on from adolescence into adulthood. Professionalism is a real thing, and regardless of how good you are at whatever you want to show off, Instagram is not nearly as professional as we might hope. We also fall into the trap of originality; if there are 100 other people like you on Instagram, and they might even be better at making content then you are, why bother with you?
We build websites to stand out from the crowd. We want our work to stand on it’s own two feet; no links to other creators or comments that take away from our hard dedicated work. Not only do people look at websites as having a more professional appearance, they’ll begin to see YOU more professionally. Having a website and online presence outside of social media changes people’s perspective of you subconsciously. Most people don’t even realize they feel that way (try not to think of your contemporaries view of websites-your friends might clown you for it, but your next boss might promote you for it.)
What we’ll do in this class is kill two birds with one stone (maybe even more if you really think about it). We’ll learn web development skills with HTML and CSS to build our own portfolios in whatever you want. You can do art, sports, music, dancing, collecting, whatever your heart desires. Your website will exist as a digital footprint that you can show off to not only your friends and family, but also to prospective job opportunities or even colleges/secondary programs. Not only will you learn to build your own, but you’ll be able to better understand other people’s web pages, if they’re actually good or not, and be able to integrate their discoveries into your own pages.