Over the next few posts I’ll walk through the decisions to make when building your own site of this type (the blogfoliosume). Personally I lean towards the more technical and involved approach, but I will try and provide options along the way along with the pros and cons of each decision (i.e. the easy option vs the cheap option vs the flexible option, rarely can you get all 3). Let’s begin!

Purpose

This site needs to serve three purposes for me, you may not need or want all three. I need:

• A place to store training content (primarily e-learning) I’ve created and collect it as a portfolio
• A resume that sells my skills and experience
• A blog to share my best practices and provide context for the other things.

Each has slightly different requirements and considerations, let’s break them down.

Portfolio

The need for a public portfolio is the highest priority and the original spark for this whole thing. I’ve created a lot of content over the years – e-learnings, videos, webapps, templates, etc – but they’re all stuck inside my employer. The first priority is a way to store projects of those types in a way that is easily accessible to anyone I wish to share them with.

On the surface this is simple, I just need a place to stick files. But what sort of files? Simple documents like PDFs or slide decks are easy thanks to services like Google Drive or Dropbox. Videos are also fairly straightforward using YouTube or Vimeo. But what about the complex e-learnings, the published content from Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate? At that point you need actual web hosting and that can get very complicated! Additional we have to consider storage space, how many projects do we want to share and how much space are they going to take up? Those files add up quick!

The other critical piece of the portfolio puzzle is presentation. At its simplest a document full of links will do the job, but it doesn’t carry quite the same cachet as a well designed visual experience! For that we’ll need a good presentation layer, some sort of CMS or site builder. This will also be a requirement for the Blog and Resume parts of this project. I’ll explore those options in Part 3.

Resume

At its simplest the resume (or CV if you prefer) is just another file, but I’ve got something bigger in mind. I want a dedicated page on the site that recreates my resume with more visual oomph than the “2 pages max” guidelines of the traditional resume file. I want a timeline and fancy bars to indicate skill levels, recommendations and references written like customer testimonials; this thing is like a product page for me!

So once again this will come back around to the need for a good web design approach. Writing HTML from the ground up? A good WYSIWYG design program? Templates galore? So many options to consider!

Blog

Throw a rock on the internet and you’ll hit a blogging platform, so this part is hypothetically easy. But ideally I want this whole thing seamless and integrated, I want the transition from a blog post into a portfolio example and over to the resume to all feel like it’s part of the same experience, which will be tough if they aren’t all built the same way. Luckily most good blogging platform also have tools for general page design.

On the flipside, a lot of blogging platforms come with limits or undesirable elements like ads. I don’t want to suddenly hit a wall where I can’t embed an example from my portfolio in the blog article explaining it because the platform doesn’t allow iframes! So this platform has to be flexible and open.

Other Considerations

In addition to meeting the needs of the three purposes of my site, I have a handful of general “rules” for myself for this project.

Cost: Low to Zero

I don’t want to spend any money on this thing, or at least the absolute least amount of money possible. This is partially just a challenge/choice thing, but it’s partially a necessity – I can’t be spending a large monthly amount in the hopes it’ll land me clients/a job that can justify the costs. Maybe someday, but not now.

It’s also just a personal philosophy you’ll see pop up a lot when I talk about technology: Why pay someone to do something you could do yourself? It’s not a philosophy that extends everywhere in my life (i.e. mowing the lawn, I’ll happily pay someone else) but I’m very much a “build it don’t buy it” person when it comes to most learning technology solutions.

Custom Domain

This is the one cost I’m set on, ~$10 a year for your own domain name is a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. I’m not completely opposed to “charles.professionalsoundinghost.com” but “funfreeblogs4u.xyz/users/charles99523” isn’t going to cut it. It’s like your email: Gmail is pretty acceptable these days, but doesn’t a custom address look even better? And you have to admit to raising an eyebrow when someone gives you a Hotmail right?

Easy to Maintain

Obviously this one is relative. My idea of easy is probably very different than yours, but even I have my limits. I’ll cover this in more detail in the future articles in this series, but I started out this journey looking at various static site builders that gave an incredible amount of flexibility, but at too steep a learning curve for what I’m trying to accomplish. I had to reset myself a few times after wasting days going down bunny trails that just led to more questions than answers. In the end the solution has to balance all the stuff I want to do with the reality of how much time I have to actually do it.

I’ll outline the solution I ended up with (where I’m actually writing this postmortem so to speak) in a future article, but I’m happy with the balance I struck.

Accessible, Secure, and Findable

Early on in this process I hit a wall when I realized one of my tests was being blocked by my current employers firewall! This is obviously a big deal, if one company blocks it then others likely would too, which would really put a damper on that whole “getting hired” thing if they can’t even see what I’m selling (you know, me). After doing some digging, this can be caused by a lot of factors. The host, the age of the site, the TLD, not having SSL, having too much placeholder content, and a lot more. As a result some of the decisions we’ll make along the way will be made for us to avoid these issues.

I also want people to find my site eventually. In the beginning I imagine it’ll just be former coworkers that I’ve shared it with, but again the whole “get hired” thing kinda requires lots of other people to see it too! I’m not interested in become some sort of influencer with a bunch of clickbait crap, but I do need to consider some SEO as much as I hate it (maybe a future article, but personally I think SEO has ruined the internet).

The Requirements

I keep referring to this whole thing as “the site”, but it’s really about several components that get duct taped together to make the experience I’m after. Let’s collect all the considerations above into a list of requirements. I require:

• A hosting location for a variety of content formats including:
  • Documents & images
  • Videos
  • Interactive web “packages” including HTML/CSS/Javascript
• A flexible site authoring platform that can generate both blog-style content and other pages in a visually pleasing way
  • It must be easy to maintain
  • It must be flexible to support experimentation and demonstration of things I haven’t thought of yet
• A custom domain that is professional and not likely to be flagged by firewalls
• Relatively easy setup and maintenance on all of the above
• Security and SEO on all the above
• Low to no cost on any of the above

Closing

Am I overthinking all this? Probably. But hey, I like thinking! This whole project is actually a lot of fun for me, and I hope you enjoy the journey! Next up I’ll dig into each of the big choices to make on hosting providers and content management, then bring it all together into the solution I chose as well as some alternatives to consider. See you then!