How to develop a portfolio

Setting Conceptual Goals

Your portfolio is yours, so it should have contents, a style, and a look-and-feel that feel right to you. But there are several goals that are common to all portfolios, and you should think about these constantly. By starting and maintaining a web portfolio, you

* Enhance your mastery of the subject of your major--whatever it is.
* Present and share work you have done in the courses that make up your major.
* Demonstrate how the work is connected together.
* Track how your mastery increases, and your interests evolve.
* Direct viewers to other websites that add additional or contrasting perspectives on your subject.

Planning Your Portfolio

Your original proposal is a good place to start your portfolio: after all, it provides a kind of road-map to the work you have proposed to include in your major. Your first page (the home page--or "index.htm") might include the entire proposal, or at least the formal description of your major with a prominent link to the rest of the proposal. Papers, lab reports, visual images, or other work from courses or internships should be included as separate pages; and you might start to organize your portfolio by creating links to each piece of work from the course-list section of your proposal. You may also include a section where you keep track of evolving ideas for your senior project, with a link from the senior project section of your proposal. Perhaps you will include a page with links to external sites you find useful.

Solving Technical Problems

Technical Support and Resources:

The CIS currently recommended software for preparing web portfolios is Macromedia Dreamweaver, although students may also use Netscape Composer (the HTML editor included in the Netscape Communicator suite of web applications). You may certainly use other programs to maintain your portfolio (and of course you can even tag HTML with a text editor!), but the Multimedia Development Center (MDC) will fully support your use of Dreamweaver, and Dreamweaver is available on several campus computers, Windows or Mac, including the library media center. Information and Instructional Technologies (IIT) provides useful online documentation for Dreamweaver and Composer.

IIT also provides a complete online directory of documentation for software in use on campus, and provides general help and technical support through a helpdesk.

Student workers in the Multimedia Development Center are available to support CIS students. Drop in or contact Janet Collrin .

Saving your web portfolio:

* First, you should save the files in your dedicated folder on "Brit.Shared" (S-drive). But also save the files that make up your portfolio in more than one place-- to a disk, CD, or hard drive (it would be BAD to lose all that work!).
* Second, all the files in your Brit-folder should have short but descriptive names that do not include spaces or symbols. All file names should end with .html or .htm.
* Third, although all your text files should just be in the first layer of your dedicated Brit-folder, it is usually better to save images or graphics in a subfolder, called "images." In general, image files should be saved as .jpg, so pages load faster.
* Finally, once your portfolio reaches a stage where you are comfortable, consult with Susan or David to have it uploaded to the college web server; then there will be link to it from the CIS page "Web Community" and--in theory--anyone on the www can view it.