Creating own website for portfolio.

BurntOrangeOrder

BurntOrangeOrder

100+ Posts
I guess it's high time that I stop just being an internet user and actually contribute something back.

Since I don't have anything to do, and a website would be a great way for potential employers to check my stuff out, I am looking for advice for starting one.

I don't know shite, so everything from buying my address, to bandwidth, to actually designing and building would be appreciated.

I want to keep it simple at first. I want to make it look appealing of course, but I don't need some fancy user interface that is cool and at first but ultimately slow and time consuming. I want to simply post a resume, and then have a portfolio of my work. An e-mail address would be cool too.

Maybe a message board so I could recieve 'constructive' criticism from anybody.
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How much will it cost? How long will it take?
 
I just started setting up a site for my neighborhood association. As far as the hosting and registration goes, after a considerable amount of research, I decided on
lunarpages. There are slightly cheaper outfits, but they don't offer the space, features, and bandwidth. I paid roughly $115 for a year of hosting and the domain registration. They have a web based console (as do most hosts), but you can publish straight from FrontPage if you prefer.
 
i use phpbb for my clan website. it's a pretty neat bulletin board that is FREE and runs on a mysql database (i think).

rest of the stuff i do in frontpage with lots of cool plugins.

frontpage is a really good place to start and as you progress, u can find more and more cool features in it.
 
Lunarpages includes pphp and unlimited MySQL databases as long as you stay within your storage limits. That was one of the reasons I went with them. They do not support .asp, but I shouldn't need that.

I concur regarding FrontPage. If you have it, it's a good place to start. You can use it to create the simple stuff as well as the more complex. Most hosts allow you to publish your web using FrontPage.
 
i actually learned HTML using an AOL program called Personal Publisher... FrontPage is similar. Just play around with it, make a few pages, which will inevitably be ****** since they're your first ones... start making some pages, and pay attention to the HTML code and see what does what.

then you can start looking at the HTML of other webpages (right click > view source) and you can start learning how some other websites do the things they do.

it's a long process and a lot of work to learn it really well, but it's fun to learn.
 
I've been working on a web gallery system as a side project. It is a few days from release -- I will mostly likely GPL it. I still might decide to take a week or so to add an extra theme, do some more documentation and spend some time trying to hack it.

it is similar to Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/), or Coppermine (http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/) in function.

I didn't like those two (I think they are the best gallery systems available - by far), so I decided to develop my own. The templating system for all of the gallery systems I've seen is ugly - you have to be somewhat familiar with an API or worse, intimately familiar with the backend PHP code to do more than basic background color and font changes. All CMS and CMS like systems have very inflexible templating systems. The current state of the art are in the smarty and chameleon templating systems. I think both suck in a major way.

I've devised an XSLT based system that allows designers to benefit from all the functionality of a gallery system without needing any familiarity with the backend PHP code. Unlike with templating systems, you have full control over content, function and navigation - from the design side. Forms are used to control function, query strings are used to control content, XSL documents are used to control display.

Unlike with the other systems, no knowledge of an obscure API or templating system is needed to exert complete control over the design of the gallery - you only need to be familiar with W3C standards XML (conforming to a schema) and XSL.

I think it is pretty darn neat. To demonstrate the system, I'm distributing it with a few themes of my own. I'm taking one gallery and making a slideshow display in Flash and then doing the same gallery in HTML - complete with thumbnails. And I didn't even need to edit a single line of PHP code or utilize an obscure templating system to do it. I designed the look and navigation from the ground up and had a gallery system ready to manage it.

I'm pretty close to release. Almost everything works right now, but I'm not going to release anything that's not tip-top solid.

PM me if you are interested in using my gallery system. If you are ok with a gallery that looks like every other gallery and just want to display your portfolio, I'd go with one of the above two systems - Gallery or Coppermine. Those two projects are more mature than mine - they have more functionality and have been tested on a wide spectrum of configurations. If you are interested making your gallery design from the ground up as opposed to working with a rigid template and are a somewhat capable designer (i.e. hand coding HTML markup and XML and XSL technologies won't scare you off), you might want to take a look at what I've done. I really do think I'm on to something with the complete elimination of a template system.

Of course if you don't need of the functionality a gallery system gives just make your own static gallery.

One more thing: if you are at all interested in doing more than just a few static web pages with rare updates, stay the hell away from FrontPage and similar programs. It will cost your more time and effort than it initially saves.
 
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