Creating a Writing Portfolio Website: A Tutorial
My professional writing projects are usually produced at the request of various editors. Today’s assignment is different. Today I am the writer and the assigning editor — but I am also the product.
The goal with this project is to market myself.
Today’s assignment is to create my own professional website. Presumably, if you’re reading this, my endeavor has been successful. And if you’re here to assess my work as a writer in order to give me a job, even better.
Setting out to share samples
This undertaking started out as a plan to find a home for the writing portfolio I intend to share as I pursue new professional opportunities. I needed an organized, reliable, and easily accessible location for potential employers to find my work.
Before this project, my professional writings were scattered all over the internet on client websites with no attribution or acknowledgement of my connection to the work, with no way for me to ensure that web links to these works remain active, and with possible issues involving proprietary content or copyright claims.
A one-stop shop for my writing samples seemed much more convenient for me and my audience.
So, I set out to learn how to make a good impression using a simple but high-quality website to display my writing. In doing so, I decided to take the opportunity to chronicle the experience—both as a writing sample itself and to demonstrate my process as a guide to other content creators in need of a similar channel to share their work.
Identifying a workable solution to a common need
The idea for a website for professional advancement is not new. As you can imagine, there is a lot of information on the topic to sort through. Much of the information available about building websites is geared toward e-commerce sites or other more elaborate online operations. Most business websites require much more functionality than my website would need.
Thankfully, the limited scope of my project meant that the process would be fairly straightforward and genuinely manageable.
I also saw the whole exercise as an opportunity to learn something new and to write about it, two of my favorite activities.
Hopefully, my experience will help demystify the process for other writers who may find themselves in need of a simple online portfolio to share their writing samples.
In an effort to keep the writing samples short, I have broken the process down into several parts. Click through the links below to learn about my website project and to assess my skills along the way.
- Choosing a Web Address
- Selecting a Web Builder and a Host Server
- Following Bluehost’s Set-Up Prompts
- Using WordPress Through Bluehost
- Adding and Editing Blocks in WordPress
- Adding Additional Pages (and Links to Them)