Students: As we’ve mentioned a number of times, getting your work out there for folks to see (especially when looking for a job or internship) is really important. With that, here’s a simple 1-2-3 of how to get your work on the web — there’s obviously more than one way and many parts to each and some are fairly low-tech.
We’ve said that getting yourname.com is very important. If you don’t have it, buy it. If it’s not available, find something that is. This will allow you to get email here and look more legit, as well as be able to host some sort of site at this address in the future. There are a myriad of places to buy/register your domain, but two of the more popular ones are joker.com and godaddy.com. I prefer GoDaddy as I like the interface and the toolset lets me do what I want, specifically email-forwarding and domain-forwarding... which means, someone sends a note to “hunter@hlwimmer.com” and I tell GoDaddy to FWD all mail coming here to my comcast account (or aol, gmail, or me.com account).
URLs cost about $10/year and worth it if you can buy and keep a good one. I’d suggest to buy .com and .net.. And maybe .org but don’t worry about .info or .tv or any of the weird ones. Sometimes, you can host one type of work at the .com address and another type at the .org address... For instance, for your thesis project, the .net might be your blog while the .com is your portfolio site. We do this for 79NM.com (our blog), 79NM.org (the resources group) and 79NM.net (the recent-grad postfolio site).
Ok. Now that folks know who you are, what will you give them once they try to look for you? When preparing a “website”, there’s a number of ways to begin from hardest [•••••] to easiest [•].
[•••••] Custom coded site
This is the snazziest, but also the most time consuming and skill-intensive. It’s also the most difficult to update once you get it locked down unless you’re a hard-core coder. The advantages are that it can be anything you want. Any color. Any size. You can sell stuff. It can make noise. It can have password-protected pages.
For this, you need a URL (above) and a hosting service — and depending on the type (portfolio vs. e-commerce) you might need to get a premium service. Locally, laughingsquid.com is a popular hosting service (mediatemple.com, speakeasy.net and 1and1.com is also popular). Godaddy.com also has a hosting service, although I’ve not used it. There are literally millions of places to go to have hosting done and in many cases, a small bit comes free — for instance, you might have a hosting abilities automatically through your ISP or mac.com account. Once you have this, you can store all sorts of files online in addition to your general site. For instance, yourname.com/mystolenmusic/nirvana-bleach.zip (although we’d not recommend that).
[••••] A custom blog
Don't get hung up on the word “blog”. Blogging is an act. The format that houses the act of blogging is know as a “blog”, but a blog format can also look like a plain-old-website if you tweak the toolset just right. A full-on wordpress site is lighter on coding than a full HTML site and allows you to creatively format things in a website-like way. Crystal Chou has her site crystalchou.com in a wordpress site, but it doesn't look like your typical "what I did on my summer vacation" blog.
One note about Wordpress — there are two versions: Wordpress.org, an installed-on-the-server application... and wordpress.com, a web-based blogging application. They are quite different. Wordpress.org is what we're talking about here.
Using a domain-forwarding "masking" option, you can hide the domain that the site lives under — for instance, if your site is yourname.wordpress.com, masing will hide the "wordpress" part so it looks like yourname.com in the browser. I'm using that right here on room557.com. You'd never actually know where the main site lived unless you did a bit of digging.
A newer type of site construction in the form of templatized pages is also becoming popular with creatives. Sites like CargoCollective or Indexhibit offer a balance between a custom site and blog-like architecture. They’re harder to get up and running than a blog, but less of a headache than a custom HTML site.
[•••] A templatized blog
Basic Wordpress as well as typepad.com and blogger.com offer paid (usually $15/mo or so) semi-custom templatized sites that also allow some flexibility as far as colors and imagery. These can be nice as they also host files (pictures, etc), so for one price you can have a semi-custom site and a place to hang your files.
This site (room557) is set up this way through Typepad. I've customized the header and colors and it looks better than the basic free-blogger site. With Typepad, I can host almost any number of separate blogs/pages under one account (including the site that 79NM.net FWDs to). Oddly, this site lives under the domain of the blog I initially started to catalog the renovation of my house, but you'd never really know it as I've masked the URL (see above). I've also hosted separate pages for a motorcycle rebuild project, party invites and all sorts of stuff, so I'm really getting my money's worth. And, again, with domain masking, it would be fairly noise-free for the audience when looking at the address itself.
[••] A free blog
You can also get free blogs from Typepad, Blogger and Wordpress. Unfortunately, these services are very limited insofar as look and feel and the ability to host larger amounts of files. It’s good, though, if you can work with one of their basic templates and use hyperlinks to throw people to the places you want to get.
One afternoon, for kicks, I set up a starter website for my landscaper at jzcruz.wordpress.com — he’s just a super-cool guy in need of a bit of promotion. It’s a slightly-modified, basic wordpress format and looks and feels very much like a “real” website. When it was active, the URL jzcruz.com forwarded to jzcruz.wordpress.com through a simple domain-forwarding, so it even looked like a "real" site. I think this took me 20 minutes to set up — from buying the URL to surprising him with a website site. Granted this is nowhere as impressive as a custom coded site, it’s better than nothing (and why it is 2-stars and not 5). I even had inexpensive moo.com cards printed with the same image and the website address and contact information for a complete package.
[••] A free portfolio-hosting site
Sites like behance.net and the commarts.com (creativehotlist.com) network have free (or low-cost) portfolio hosting services. The nice thing about these is that they’re part of a community and you can often get extra eyes on your work if it’s hanging here. The dark side is that more eyes are on your un-copyrighted work, so if you’re going to hang stuff out there where other designers can easily see it, check into placing some copyright verbiage on your page. Look to creativecommons.org for a version of this.
Honestly, it’s not a bad idea to get familiar with CreativeCommons and use their nomenclature where you hang your work. The copyright discussion is a looong one, but creativecommons.org is a good place to start.
[••] An iWeb site (or other similar service)
iWebsites (and their bretheren) are simple and easy, but look like iWeb sites. I designed an iWeb site when we were selling our house a few years ago (URL now expired) and was able to tweak it enough so that it looked like a real website with pictures and navigation. It was hard work, though, to get it to not look like “what i did on my summer vacation when I took my new iPhone everywhere we went”.
iWeb also necessitates that you bone up and get a .Mac/.Me account which aren’t cheap and ultimately why the site mentioned above is expired. If I had done something and hung it on a blog or on my own server, it’d still be there and I wouldn’t have to pay $99/year for a service that I ultimately don’t use much (mac.com/me.com). To each their own.
[••] An interactive PDF online
A step above the below, you can use Acrobat-Pro to put some buttons on your PDF and hang it somewhere on the web and have yourname.com FWD to this address. Check out adobe.com on tips on how to make a PDF jazzy.
[•] A PDF online
At the very least, you can get yourname.com to forward to a hosted file somewhere on the web (maybe you store it on your .Mac/.Me account). This might take a while to load up on the other end, but it’s better than nothing...
Again, there are a ton of creative ways to get your work online and the above is just a teaser... To see something cool and low-fi, check out booneoakley.com. They’ve used the YouTube format to do something interesting.
Have fun.
--
Edit: This just in from AAU instructor Bob Slote
Here is a list I hand out to my students when we start an interactive project:
Presentations
You have many choices when developing a portfolio but for many of you, not having the knowledge of HTML/CSS I’ve picked a few sites that will provide you with the tools you need (non-HTML/CSS) sites. Here are a few:
http://www.wix.com/
http://www.yola.com/
http://doodlekit.com/home
http://www.webs.com/
http://www.moonfruit.com/
http://www.ucoz.com/
http://www.weebly.com/
http://www.jimdo.com/index.php
http://virb.com/
http://themetrust.com/
http://muse.adobe.com/
Or Blog type sites:
http://wordpress.org/
http://www.squarespace.com/
http://www.typepad.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/
https://www.tumblr.com/
https://posterous.com/
Sites that allow you to ‘Mock-up your apps:
http://www.invisionapp.com/
https://developer.apple.com/xcode/
http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/
http://mockapp.com/m/Home.html
http://www.mockabilly.com/
If you plan to test your site…
and you should here is a list of testing sites: (some of these sites you maybe need to recruit ‘testers’. You could try “taskrabbit.com’ as means to find users).
http://www.trymyui.com/
http://fivesecondtest.com/
http://www.loop11.com/
There are many, many more. Take your pick, you pick these, or any others you might know of, of if you can, code from scratch or use a program like Dreamweaver.
Comments