This afternoon someone emailed me with a commonly asked question:
Happy Monday! Bleh. Could you give me some advice? I am trying to put together an online portfolio/website to send to possible employers. First I tried Tumblr, then it got weird. Then I looked up articles about what everyone else is using, and the top ones were WordPress, Pressfolios, Flavors, and About.me. Dunno if you are familiar with any of those besides WordPress, I just assume you are because you seem to be a journalism genius (I’m not brownnosing). If I do use WordPress, do I sign in through the University or just WordPress not-affiliated with UofO? ANYway, what’s the best way to go about compiling the shred of work that I have for people to see? Any tips? I’m trying to get an internship this summer so I just wanna impress all the head honchos out there.To which I replied:
I don’t bother with other CMS (content management systems) because working with wordpress serves 2 functions.- It gives me a space that I can reasonably customize for $26/year
- Learning WordPress is a very valuable skill out in the real world. Many organizations use WordPress, and knowing how to navigate their CMS from day 1 is a huge bonus. Alternatively, many organizations don’t have a website (or a very good one), which means I can easily design a new, fancy, functional and friendly website for anyone in less than 6 hours with my knowledge of WordPress if I needed to—something I could bring up in an interview and not be lying about. Also a huge bonus, IMO.
Hope this helps!