WCSac 2018 Portfolios

The purpose of a portfolio is to convince prospects to work with you. Whether your service is photography, design, development, or construction, your portfolio needs more than beautiful images. If you’re going to convince people to hire you and not your competition, you can’t just show people what you built. You need to explain the business problems you helped your clients solve and the outcomes you helped them achieve.

The first and most important step in creating your portfolio is determining what to put in it, which means knowing who your ideal client is and what they care about. But after you’ve done the content strategy work, what then? How do you create a portfolio with the elements you need, without adding unnecessary features? How do you make it easy for yourself to add new projects? And can you create it without hiring a developer?

It’s already possible to use code to customize WordPress portfolio plugins, and to use page builders to create layouts for portfolio archives and single entries. Those methods will both have a place for some time to come, but the new block-based Gutenberg editor provides a new way to build a portfolio template, and it might be even easier to use than a page-builder.

This session will review the elements of a good portfolio and explain how to combine core blocks and custom blocks into reusable block templates. The speaker will also address the question of where you might still prefer a page-builder and where you might need a developer — at least in the short term. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how Gutenberg can make it easier to promote your business effectively.

Transcript

1. WordCamp Sacramento 2018 Sallie Goetsch @salliegoetsch https://speakerdeck.com/wpfangirl/
3. port·fo·li·o pôrtˈfōlēˌō/ noun 1. a large, thin, flat case for loose sheets of paper such as drawings or maps.
4. “The real purpose of a professional portfolio is to provide tangible proof of your value in the workplace.”†
10. https://www.sinicom.com/about/case-studies/
11. “Case studies are the best way to show your work. Outline the challenges of the project, and then tell the story of how you arrived at the solution.”†
13. •Headline •Client Logo •Client Profile •Executive Summary •Client Quote •Challenges But skip the trite stock photo!
14. •How You Helped •Results & ROI •Illustrations •Call to Action
16. h1. Case Study Headline Executive Summary. Keep it short enough to act as your meta description, and use keywords. h2. The Challenge What motivated the client to hire you? What were the pain points? Were they losing money? Quantifying the problem helps demonstrate the value of your work. This should be one or two paratraphs and maybe a bullet list. You could add a graphic or image if appropriate. You can include a client Our business was in so much trouble before we hired WP Fangirl. — Job title at Client Company h2. Client (Company) Name Short client profile goes here. Tell us what industry the company is in, what the company does, who their customers are, their mission, their vision, their purpose.
18. •ACF and custom templates •PODS and shortcode templates •Widgets •Page builders
23. The paragraph block has a custom font size.
36. •Portfolio Post Type •Project Type Taxonomy •Client Type Taxonomy •Project Tag Taxonomy https://github.com/wpfangirl/block-portfolio
37. https://generatewp.com/
42. https://github.com/wpfangirl/block-portfolio/
46. • Twitter: @salliegoetsch • GitHub: wpfangirl • SpeakerDeck: wpfangirl • Web: wpfangirl.com • Meetup: eastbaywp.com • Email: sallie@wpfangirl.com