GRRRRRR! I have had soo much hassle with internet access the last few days… I am with Fast 4, who we went with because we didn’t want to get tied into a contract. However, they still want to charge us a cancellation fee. WHATS THE POINT OF NOT HAVING A CONTRACT THEN? Its broken so many times now its not even funny. I’d rather not have a lot of things than internet. Not having internet really sucks when you are a web designer!

Anyway, onto the real post: A lot of my friends are excellent illustrators or animators etc, but don’t really know alot about web design and what is possible.
I made this blog using wordpress, and most of the rest of the site is powered by the features and plug ins that wordpress has to offer. It takes a while and a lot of research to develop and find all of the things that you might need to make your plain wordpress blog into a portfolio so I thought I would gather the knowledge that I have together and present it in an easy to digest blog post. lol. It isn’t easy to make a portfolio in wordpress, but its better. You can update your site from where ever you are in the world quickly and easily without having to have any knowledge of html, new pages are dynamically generated and if you need to make a change you can just make it in the one place.

You can get a free wordpress account from http://www.wordpress.com, but you don’t have any control over how it looks or the plugins that you can use with it. However its very quick and easy to set up and update. There are many themes available for you to choose from although you don’t have any control over it beyond that.

I used the installed version of wordpress which you can get from http://www.wordpress.org. There are so many possibilities with wordpress, it has been in development for a long time and the updates are regular, so it is pretty secure. It comes with Akismet spam blocker, which is great. I have not once had a dodgy bit of spam through, its blocked all the sex comments etc.

Anyway, here are the other plugins that I have used or I think are worth using in a portfolio.

1. Next Gen Gallery- The support for this is amazing, alex rabe seems to be the kind of guy who wants to take peoples suggestions into account to make it better. Its easily the best gallery plugin out there, and it works extremely well.
2. Word tube- For embedding media files, flash, streaming videos, pngs etc. Its by the same guy as next gen gallery.
3. Comicpress- a really easy to install theme for people who are interested in using their blog to publish web comics.
4. WordBook- A great way of getting traffic to your site from your friends on facebook
5. Sociable- Make it easy for your viewers to tag your site through delicious or stumble upon and many others.
6. BloxPress- Really nifty web 2.0 style drag and drop boxes… and its degradeable! I might have used this if I was starting from scratch, but plugging it in later seems like a bad idea coz it might mess with it a bit.
7. Yak- Yak is a shopping cart for wordpress. I have recently installed it, but its a bit complicated. So depending on whether or not it appears here over the next few weeks is probably whether or not its worth it. Otherwise you can use up another database and use Zencart.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions about making a wordpress portfolio, then I’ll be happy to answer anything or enhance this post so that its more useful. Also if you are thinking of going with fast4 internet. Don’t.