Portfolios -- Important or not?

As the semester finally comes to a close, it is a necessity to reflect on the final project. The final project in COM 336 is a very important piece in helping students to market themselves and make moving on after college a lot easier. While this project is a lot of work, it is beneficial to each student in the long-run. The final project that was assigned was to create a webpage that would be used as an online portfolio as well as a way to promote ourselves on other platforms. It is a 3-page site, complete with a bio, contact, and portfolio page. The basic look of the site is rather simple and clean with the ease of customizing it to however you want it to look. The portfolio page included around 10 works that we are proud of from throughout our college career, which can be edited or changed at any time. Designing the website was a unique experience, since it has something is new and different for a lot of people. Before this class, HTML code was something that hadn’t been taught in any other class before. However, some students were more familiar than others (hello, MySpace editing coming in handy once again!) In addition, this was the first time for most, if not all, students have worked in Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a program in the Adobe Creative Suite that helps you to create and publish a website on the Internet. The program can be kind of confusing to first-time users, especially if you are not familiar with HTML code and how it works. Otherwise, the program is relatively user-friendly and is helpful to a lot of up-and-coming businesses etc. While a clean HTML template for the website was given, customization and organization of the site was solely up to the student. You could change anything from the color of your footer, to your header picture, even down to your font type or color. You couldn’t do much to change the format of the page (where the text/links sat etc.) but you were able to customize as much as possible. When it came to the organization, you had to place the documents for your portfolio page in the order that made most sense to you. Whether it was visual projects on the top and word documents on the bottom, or even vice versa, it was up to you. The customization and organization of each individual site was necessary to make the site reflective of each student. In addition to the important and vital customization and organization, each student’s social media accounts had to be incorporated into the site. In today’s day and age, if you are not ever-present on each important social media background, especially if you are looking to go into a communications field, you are dead in the water. Social media is a part of everyday life and staying fresh and relevant on each of the important sites just as important. On each site, there were templates included for links to these social media platforms: Blogger, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These social media sites are the most important for potential employers when looking at a potential employee. While the site itself is used as a promotional tool for potential employers, links to our social media accounts are just as valuable when it comes to marketing yourself to a potential employer. This site will be used to market myself in ways that would have not been possible before the dawn of the internet, as well as a way for employers to see what I am all about so that I may be the one they call for the interview.