Website self-evaluation: Content, design, navigation

My main goal in building a website is to make my work known. It started as a job for a university discipline, but I intend to continue the site, making many improvements when I have more time.

My site will have users linked to animation. If it is well publicized, perhaps even future employers. That is why it is important to have a digital portfolio because it can pave the way for my professional career. The portfolio promotes and disseminates my work, showing the quality and type of work I develop. The portfolio is an instrument that shows what I can do and that allows me to guarantee future work. When we present our digital portfolio it is a way to introduce ourselves (through a brief biography) and show our best work.

In the construction of my digital portfolio/website I used a logo created by me (my name) and used the Wix image gallery (because they can be used without copyright problems). I started the site by choosing a template related to the portfolios, but then I changed almost everything, from the headers, the menu, created text boxes, buttons, boxes, among other things. This is because when using the template, I had to reference the previous one and it seemed that my identity was questioned. Maybe I lost on the design, getting a less appealing layout, but I created it.

The template I chose was Pedro Castro's artistic portfolio because it was simple, neutral colors, a simple menu, apparently everything I consider ideal on a website. Hence my choice.

My website has four pages because it was what I needed for the first moment. A "Home" page with a text alluding to the animation, showing immediately what my professional area is. A "Portfolio" page, where I will post my work. A "Bio" page with a brief biography. And a "Contact" page where I can be contacted by people who are interested in my work. I could add pages that I may need in the future, but I had no content for them. Going to a website without content only makes us waste time, it would be a bad option.

My website has social media links, like my Blog, Facebook, Instagram, and youtube. My pages are not connected/interlinked, because my menu is very simple and the content is very small. It is very easy to navigate my website, exactly because it is still very simple and with little content. In the future when I have more animations and other work to present, I have to rethink the site.

As for the contact page, I did experiments and it works very well.