How to Set Up Your Portfolio Site

| gabe_t

Read this first to Activate your U.OSU.EDU account

  1. Activate your u.osu.edu site.
  2. Learn about Navigating U.OSU.

Navigate to the U.OSU dashboard and follow the below steps to set-up your site as a portfolio site.

Scroll down to watch the video walk through of these steps.

  1. Change the site’s theme to Orton.
  2. Go to Settings > Reading. Set the Site Visibility to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”
  3. Activate the Jetpack Plugin. See Jetpack for details on the Jetpack plugin.
    1. From the Jetpack page on U.OSU, click Set up Jetpack. This SHOULD take you directly to the setup process for Jetpack. My experience is that this rarely works on the first click and will show an error several times before working. Just keep trying.
    2. Once you get the the Jetpack Setup screen, create a WordPress.com log-in by establishing a username and password. Save this info somewhere in case you need it later. Follow the prompts to link Jetpack to your account. You may see an option to select a plan type. If you do, select Start with Free when it asks what plan you’d like.
    3. Navigate back to your u.osu site because Jetpack and WordPress just abandoned you in an unfamilar site and interface. Sigh in exasperation at a poor user experience and vow to rid the world of such issues in your future as a designer.
    4. Note: this will change your URL from ending with name.## to name-##. (Example: buckeye.1 becomes buckeye-1). This is ok, just keep track of what your website URL is by clicking “View Site” from the dashboard.
  4. Enable Portfolios in Jetpack
    1. From the Jetpack page on U.OSU, click Settings. Scroll down to “Custom content types” and turn on the button next to Portfolios.
  5. Click on Pages in the left navigation
    1. Edit the “Sample Page” to become your “About” page. Don’t forget to update the “permalink.”
    2. Create a New Page and call it “Portfolio”. In the Page Attributes widget, set the template to “Default Template”. In the text editor for the page, add  the word “portfolio” with brackets [ ] around it. Publish the page. Don’t do anything else to this page.
    3. Create a New Page. Call it “Process Journal.” Publish it. Don’t do anything else to this page.
  6. Update Settings
    1. Under General:
      1. Change Site Title to your preferred first and last name. Ex. “Gabe Tippery” as opposed to “Gabriel Tippery”
      2. Set the tag line as “A Design Foundations Portfolio”
      3. Set the Timezone to a city in the Eastern timezone (like New York). You can also choose to modify your Date and Time Formats here.
      4. Click Save Changes.
    2. Under Writing:
      1. Scroll down to “Portfolio Projects” where it says “You theme supports jetpack-portoflio” and set it to 25 projects shown per page.
      2. Click Save Changes.
    3. Under Reading:
      1. From the “Your Homepage Displays” section, select A static page. There are two drop-down menu choices:
        • Homepage – Choose the page “Portfolio” to be your new homepage.
        • Posts page – Choose the page “Process Journal” to be your new blog post page.
      2. Click Save Changes.
    4. Under Discussion:
      1. Turn Comments Off.
      2. Click Save Changes.
  7. Remove the sidebar from the portfolio page. Click on Appearance in the left nav, then Widgets in the sub menu. Delete each widget from the Sidebar panel in the upper right.

Video how-to:

You are done with the hard part and 90% of the setup.

Now we have to start creating content. After we get a few types of content going, we can come back and bring more structure and clarity to our menus and sidebars.

For now, you can just start experimenting with the following:

  • Working with Posts – Posts are dynamic information, usually displayed in reverse-chronological order with the most recent post at the top of the page. Common elements of a post include: title, published date, author information, content, comments, tags and categories. If you have done all the above correctly, these should appear under your menu item “Process Journal.”
  • Creating Projects – Each project may represent a specific collection of work or an individual piece of work. Projects function similarly to posts with two primary exceptions: the individual project page does not contain widgets and project featured images display on the portfolio page.