Digital self promotion -Cargo Collective

When we first started this module our lecturer  mentioned to us that we would need to have a core portfolio website, one that would show off all of our professional work. I was a little intimidated at first because i knew that this meant that we would have to make our own website which had always looked so difficult. Normally i am quite good with programs and software and i seem to pick things up pretty fast but the thought of making a website from scratch seemed like a hard task. I looked at various website making sites in attempt to narrow down my choices.

our lecturer  first introduced us to Cargo Collective which was a basic site builder, he also mentioned that he himself used cargo along with artist Jack Teagle!



This is a screen shot of our lecturers website, it features a simple navigation bar to the left and a medium sized header image above the listings. To the right of the text there are 14 panels filled with work, a few of them are actually animated so that the image changes every couple of seconds giving off the idea that there will be more work within that little square. the squares have no boarders between them and instead the images colours work as a natural boarder.

The side bar features links to his online shop, his blog, contact details and various websites which are relevant to his portfolio. The site has a plain white background which i think helps to isolate the work tiles as there is nothing to distract.
Our lecturer also pointed out that he has a custom domain name which added the finishing touch to his website.

After doing some research i found out that cargo collective features two kinds of account, one that is free; giving you access to most of the templates and allows up to 10 projects at a single time; or you can opt to pay for an account which gives you full access to all of cargo's features. Paying for an account also allows you to add custom HTML code to your site which could alter a variety of qualities about the site such as font style, custom icons and animated layouts. Buying an account also gives you a full domain name of your choosing and you also get up to 30 projects that you can have on show at once. It was not that expensive to buy an account but I feel that i do not have enough professional work for me to need 30 slots, but as my portfolio grows in size buying a site name will be something to be considered.

Cargo has a lot of options and it deals with CSS which is all new to me, i know that despite how hard the learning curve initially was this was only really entry level website design. Cargo has a feature called projects which is what you would use to manage your work that is on the site. Above there is a screen shot taken from inside of the projects menu. I added a project thumbnail which is what will be seen on my home page, i cropped a part of my image into the square. uploading images is pretty simple, you just click on 'upload images' and then you simply select the images that you want. Within the project menu i am also able to add tags to the post which makes it easier to link my pieces together, it also helps viewers navigate my page.

Originally i chose the 'Polaris' set up which featured a side bar to the left which allowed viewers to easily navigate my page, hovering your mouse over the link also highlights the appropriate project so that you can see which link goes where before you click it. This was not the case when i first loaded the page up, i could see my projects and my header but i could not see the side bar. After searching around the internet in attempt to troubleshoot this problem i eventually emailed the guys at Cargo for a direct answer. They told me that my header my simply too large and all i needed to do was go into the CSS and go into navigation and then change the position. Above you can see that my drop down bar is now present and works accordingly. The CSS inspector allows to me individually take apart features of my site and change various things, at first this was incredibly confusing, after an afternoon of deleting number to see what happened it gained a basic understanding of the method.
Below is the basic roots of my website, this is pretty much what i want it to look like although i found that the project icons were way too small, that is something that needs to be changed.

To the right of the page you can see a large drop down bar which is my admin panel, i would use this to access the CSS inspector, site settings, support links and display options. From here i can also turn projects on or off which then indicates which projects can be seen by the public. I can also insert page links, links to external sites or add additional projects.

After messing around with the display options managed to change the size of my project squares, they are far too big now but below i have shown how i made them this big.

In the display options I was able to change the size of my project squares, i started off by making them 500 by 500 but as it appears they are too big so i needed to tweak the size of the squares until it fitted just as i wanted it to. Below you can see the final image sizes.

I forgot to take the admin bar into consideration, i need to close the side panel so that i can see my webpage at it's full size, this may change the layout of the squares and may require further attention.

This is my finished website so far, i need to add a few more projects to bulk the site out but over all i am pretty happy with it. I am yet to add an about page but that is something that can easily be added in my own time. Down the left hand side you can see my interactive drop down menu which features all of my project names and a contact section which shows links to my Tumblr, Instagram and Blogger.