A portfolio is a collection of your best work that showcases your skills for potential employers. Many writers, information architects, designers, engineers, and other professionals use portfolio websites as part of their job search.

To create an effective portfolio, you will use the three stages of effective web design: requirements gathering, experience design, and usability testing.

Requirements Gathering for a Portfolio Website

Your goal as the site owner is to convince potential employers that you have the skill and experience to work for them. You'll know that your site is successful if you get a job offer.

In order to set yourself apart from all the other job applicants, consider what you have to offer, and what you want them to remember after they leave the site. This is your personal brand.

Site User Goals:

The site's audience has its own goals and expectations. When employers post jobs, they list specific requirements for experience and abilities. They also often list personal attributes ("Must be a self starter with excellent interpersonal skills," for example) that you can communicate through the personality of your site.

Human and Technical Resources:

Consider the resources at your disposal.

• How much time can you afford to spend on this project?
• Where will the site be hosted?
• What restrictions does your site host place on file types and sizes?
• Will you need to plan for special technologies such as streaming media, XML, or Java applications?
• How often will the site need to be maintained or updated?
• How much will it cost to implement and maintain the site?

Knowing limitations and planning for them from the beginning is the best way to avoid a project that never ends.

Experience Design

Designing the user experience for your portfolio site will involve three design tools:

• A site map
• wireframes
• visual designs

Site Map

Your site map shows your home page, your major category pages, important subpages within each category, and connections between pages. It should be laid out visually with each step in the hierarchy on a separate level.

Here are sample site maps for a some student portfolio sites.

Make sure the nomenclature and the navigational structure of the site highlight your most relevant experience and portfolio pieces. If you're an engineer, your categories might include xx. If you're a technical communicator, your categories might include yy.

Wireframes

Use wireframes to do more detailed planning about how to arrange items on individual pages, as in these student examples.

Lay out areas for

• Text
• Images
• input fields
• navigation

Visual Design

Effective visual design means using visual elements to make the site content accessible, usable, and relevant to users. When the visual elements of your portfolio work so well together that everything seems to fit, employers will come away impressed.

Your visual design needs to help users find your key content and functionality. It is also how you'll express the branding decisions you made about how you want to present yourself..

Keep your design simple and clean. Figure out what your priorities are in terms of what content needs to be emphasized, and find ways to create that visual emphasis, but don't over-decorate.

Effective Portfolio Content

What you put into your portfolio will depend on what kind of job you're going for and what examples of your professional skills you have available.

Possible Content Items for an online Portfolio

• Writing samples—reports, business plans, proposals, news releases, brochures
• Completed projects—graphics samples, artwork, plans, computer programs
• Links to websites you helped create
• Awards
• A resume
• Links to universities and previous employers
• E-mail links to references
• Course descriptions

Making Your Portfolio Easy to Scan

When you create a paper resume, you know that you only have about 30 seconds to persuade potential employers that your resume merits further attention. So you have to make your resume very easy to scan.

Text written for the web needs to be even easier to scan. You want employers to get an immediate sense of what your skills are and what you offer. They should be able to predict from the link text what they'll get by following that link. The same goes for section headings and the text that follows them.

It's also crucial that you write effective short blurbs to introduce your portfolio pieces. Tell them who the piece was for, what needs it met, what skills and technical expertise went into making it. Help them be impressed by what they're about to see.

Usability Testing

Even if you are an experienced interaction designer, your prototype only represents a first draft. You now need to conduct a series of usability tests, revising your prototype based on what you learn.