About the WordPress Portfolio Assignment

The WordPress Portfolio Assignment has five primary goals:

1. to help students learn how to use and effectively engage with the standard industry content management software, WordPress.org
2. to help students learn how to blog
3. to help students create their own online portfolio where they can showcase their work
4. to help students create define their online identity
5. to reflect on the work they have created

The assignment is informed by four Course Learning Objectives:

Objective 1: Effective Communication
Students will begin to understand the foundational and contemporary principles, practices, and ethics of effective media communication, in particular in terms of how it applies to writing, typeface, photography, and social media.

Objective 3. Inclusive Use of Communication Technologies
Students will begin to develop and enhance their use of various communication technologies for the purpose of creating intentional, precise, and inclusive media objects with specific rhetorical and aesthetic goals.

Objective 4: Inquiry and Reflection
Students will begin to develop their understanding of the important roles of inquiry and reflection during the reading, creation, and communication process.

Objective 5: Experimentation
Students will begin to develop their ability to step out of their comfort zones and take risks with their approaches to and understanding of communication, design, and storytelling practices and techniques.

WordPress Portfolio Assignment Specifics

By completing this semester-long projects, students will come away from COM 200 with a Wordpess.org-based website that contains the following:

• a URL purchased from and hosted by Reclaim Hosting
• a theme you have chosen and customized
• a design blog, in which you will blog about various design-related activities
• an about page that includes biographic information, customized resume, and professional photo
• a contact page, which includes a form by which people can contact you (instead of having an email address on your site)
• individual pages for work you complete in the class
• various required and personally selected plugins and widgets that help your site function more effectively and securely
• any other content you wish to add beyond what is assigned (for example, if you have crated graphic designs in other courses or make videos as a hobby, and so on)

The website will be built over the course of the semester, starting with very basic activities and designs, then building to more complex activities and designs.

Most of the work for your website will be assigned in the weekly homework and through the Design Blog assignment.

Some of the functions of WordPress will be discussed in class, others will be learned through videos Bill either creates or has found online.

WordPress is a robust content management system that affords organizing content from the most simple pages to large business running their entire enterprise. We will only be touching on a small percentage of what WordPress has to offer. But, through this assignment you will see how and why having your own website is so vital for those in the field of communications.

Portfolio Site Assessment and Due Dates

Your site will be assessed twice during the semester, at midterm and final. But, I encourage each of you to ask me questions about your site as you have them.

A week or so prior the below due dates I will provide students with a checklist of requirements (these will be added below).

• 10/7: Portfolio Site at Midterm Due by 11:00pm
• TBD: Final Portfolio Site Due during Finals Week

Design Blog Assignment

For the Design Blog Assignment, you will compose thoughtful, engaging, and nuanced blog posts that reflect on design-related decisions you have made throughout the semester and/or make preparations for work you’ll be creating.

Required Elements
Each post will contain each of the following elements of effective blogging (modeled on the exceptional posts over at A List Apart and The Marginalian):

• a meaningful title
• clear and concise lead (that is, first sentence or two or quote) with larger font than the rest of the body text or bolded font
• appropriate placement of headings and subheadings
• appropriate use of concise and well-written sentences than make up concise paragraphs
• appropriate use of bolded text to highlight key ideas
• appropriate use of links
• appropriate use of block quotes for any extended quotations
• appropriate use of any author names
• appropriate Categories and Tags

Context-Related Element
In addition, your blog posts will contain one or more of the following multimedia based on the subject of the blog post:

• still images (in the form of screenshots, graphics, photographs, etc.)
  • including accessibility features, such as ALT text, title, and captions
• video
• audio

Blog posts are designs that communicate important information. They should not appear as uninterrupted single-paragraph text. Take care with them. Check your grammar and spelling. Place links and multimedia wisely.

Use the Blog Post Checklist (.pdf) regularly.

Your blog posts with will get more complex over time, as I ask you to incorporate more  multimedia content, move from the Classic Editor to the Block Editor, and take advantage of more WordPress features. The due dates for your blog posts are:

• 9/23: Design Post 1: On Typeface Selections
• 10/7 10/10: Design Post 2: Photograph Techniques Reflection by noon
• 10/28: Design Post 3: Multimedia Story Proposal
• 11/11 11/18: Design Post 4: From Jottings to Scenes Gear
• 12/2: Design Post 5: Gear Layout Sketches
• TBD: Design Post 6: Multimedia Story Reflection

Prompts for each post will appear below.

Assessment
Each post will be assessed by the following:

• the quality of the discussion (40%)
• the integration of Required and Context-Specific Elements (50%)
• care with grammar and spelling (10%)

Blog Post Prompts

Post 4: From Jottings to Scenes

Due: Friday, 11/18 by 11:00pm
Editor: Block Editor
Word Count: minimum 250 – 300 words (in addition to jottings and scene)
Multimedia: whatever is appropriate but if none needed, that is fine

The goal of your fourth blog post is to present and reflect on:

• jottings you have created based on observations relating to your multimedia story and a 150-word scene that emerges from those jottings

When creating the post, please present your jottings in the form of a list and your screen as a block quote (two features we have yet to use with our blogs).

Include a thoughtful and nuanced reflection in which you describe which Emerson, Fritz, and Shaw observation procedures and jottings recommendations you employed and how specific observations found their way into the scene/story you wrote.

To complete this post, you must use the Block Editor. To create a new post with the Block Editor go to:

• Settings –> Writing
• Change Default editor for all users to Block Editor
• Click Save

Use the below video to get started with the Block Editor:

Post 3: Multimedia Story Proposal

Due: Friday, 10/28 by 11:00pm
Editor: Classical Editor
Word Count: minimum 350 – 400 words
Multimedia: whatever is appropriate but if none needed, that is fine

The goal of your third blog post is to present three group, events, people, or other affiliated potential partner that your Multimedia Story team will be approaching to see if they would be interested in co-creating over the second half of the semester.

For each SJU-affiliated potential partner, I’d like to address the following:

• why that entity
• what you hope to learn from them
• what you think they have to offer in terms of generating a story
• what will challenge you as an individual if you team decided to work with that entity
• what you think you can bring to the experience co-creating with that entity
• what questions or concerns you have about co-creating with them

You don’t need to address the items in the order listed above, and your proposal shouldn’t read like a bulleted list. Rather, the ideas and topics should appear seamlessly in your discussion. The goal is to showcase the possible partner and to think through what it would be like to co-create with them.

When composing your post, please continue to do so using all the blogging techniques listed above, including (as many people forget these) adding bolded text to highlight key phrases or ideas and linking when useful for the reader (here, to the potential partner’s website or social media if they have one, for example). See the Blog Post Checklist (.pdf) to help you you ensure you have all of the requirements.

Use sub-headers and multiple paragraphs within each sub-heading section. (You can tell that multiple paragraphs is important because it is bold and underlined.) Don’t write in huge long passages of text. Online readers short, readable paragraphs.

Also, and this will be more difficult here, compose the post in such a way that it seems like you are starting on a new design and storytelling project and these are your possible partners. Don’t make it sound like an assignment or a response to an assignment.

Post 2: Photography Reflection

Due: by Monday 10/10 by noon
Editor: Classical Editor
Word Count: minimum 200 words
Multimedia: 3 Photographs Made for the Photography Techniques Assignment with overlays made in Canva as appropriate

The goal of your second blog post is to describe your decision-making process for how and why you chose 3 of 7 the photographs you included in the final submission of  Photography Techniques Assignment. Two of the images must be Technical Images and 1 must be a Soulful Images.

In other words, you’re going to walk the reader through what Composition Techniques you used and how the image is representative of that technique, as well as the passage from duChemin you were using and how you see that image as representative of that passage. Be sure to link to the Composition Techniques blog post we read and to David duChemin’s website to give your reader the ability to gain more information.

As part of revealing the composition technique you used, I’d like you to create overlays that help the reader understand what you are doing, just as O’Carroll did in his post:

To create these overlays, I recommend using Canva, a free design site that everyone uses these days to make engaging graphics.

If you need a transparent Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratio grids, right click on the following links:

• rule of thirds grid square (png)
• rule of thirds grid vertical (png)
• rule of thirds grid horizontal (png)

Here is a video for how to add the overlays to your images using Canva.

This video describes how to use Canva to create overlays. Specifically, the video discusses:

0:00: Introductory remarks and what to have to open
1:55: Uploading and editing the photo in Canva
3:20: Downloading the Rule of Thirds grid from the course website and uploading it to Canva
4:30: Using the Crop feature in Canva to show guide to help determine Rule of Thirds
5:20: Adding the Rule of Thirds grid you downloaded as a layer over the image
6:00: Downloading the image to your computer so you can eventually at it to your blog post
7:22: Creating overlay lines on an image

Make sure your post adheres to all blog post requirements. See the Blog Post Checklist (.pdf) to help you you ensure you have all of them.

Post 1: On Typeface Selections

Due: Friday, 9/23 by 11:00pm
Editor: Classical Editor
Word Count: minimum 200 words
Multimedia: Screenshots (perhaps with call-outs to enhance understanding)

For homework on 9/14, I asked you to go to Google Fonts and select TWO Header fonts and ONE body font that you might consider adding to your site. One header you should envision as the main header, the one for your name. The other you should consider a second level header, say for the title of a page or post. The body font should be imaged as for the sentences. I also asked you to write down why you have chosen it, using Santa Maria’s terminology on typeface layout and anatomy. That is, don’t write down “I just like it.” Instead, discuss things like x-height, serifs, descenders, readability, and so on.

For this first blog post, I’d like you to translate that homework into a blog post that describes your process and decision-making in choosing the three typefaces. In other words, walk the reader through your process selection process. As a way of bringing the reader into your discussion, I’d like you to discuss the aesthetic you are hoping to achieve with your typeface selections. You could also point to any typefaces you’ve seen online or in person that you like and/or want to emulate.

Your post MUST include screenshots from the Google Fonts where you are sampling text, including call-outs and highlights (when able and appropriate), such as:

You can also include screenshots of examples that you didn’t like. Often those are even more illuminating into your process. Such as:

When using call-outs, be sure to discuss them in your written text.

You can also include a screenshot of how they appear on your actual site.