CMS & Portfolio

[halifaxer]

Hi all,

Here's the thing, I studied programming among other IT skills at third level - and never bothered to go into it after I graduated as I was convinced I enjoyed it as a hobby as opposed to a career. However, I have since begun to really specialise in coding (PHP, Java, HTML, css, AJAX) and realised I really want a career in it. Due to my own misconceptions about what a web developer actually was I convinced myself I was under qualified and with no experience resigned to the fact I'd probably never break back into IT as a career.

I now work for a telecoms company, a small one with less than 200 staff and in conversation with one of my e-business colleagues mentioned about my skills. He asked for a url of project I'm working on in my spare time and came back and said he was impressed and that absolutely 100% I was capable of doing a web developer role.

So I'm now about to face what I understand to be the toughest part of becoming a prospective web developer - the portfolio.

I'm concious of not bombarding this man with questions about "what he means exactly" as he will have a hand in conducting my interview and don't want to come across as completely clueless, but I do want to clear a few things up in my head.

1. He's obviously talked to me about a portfolio, which I know should consist of at least 5 examples. He's even said to put together a few "fake" sites to show off my abilities, but I need to know if this means I need to actually purchase separate hosting packages for 5 new websites or is there a way to use free space on one of my existing projects? Stupid question I'm sure to some of you, but I'm very unsure of how to put a portfolio together exactly.

2. He's mentioned about CMS and how it's obviously more impressive if you've created your own as opposed to say using Joomla... I have no idea what he means. I've seen screencaps of Joomla and read about it, but I'm still none the wiser. The screencaps look just like cpanel which is what I use. My projects' pages are made up of several "pieces of a jigsaw" as I call them held together by lots of includes to make the final product.

Help is required to help me understand. I really want this, but I don't want to look stupid and ruin my chances by being a little jargon-stupid.

[Fang]

1. Never use free space; very unprofessional. Most hosting packages allow multiple domain hosting. Ask your selected host for details.

2. CMSs allow users and clients to edit selected pages themselves, a common request by clients. Being able to add user comments to a page is a simple CMS and you should be able to write your own script to do this. Think about what you want to do; generic CMS, custom CMS, 'includes' sites, or a combination of these. Most importantly, what is your market going to be? What are their requirements?

[thesean]

Hello halifaxer,

1. If by free space, you mean available space on one of your already hosted sites, that's fine to use. Just make sure the url is something clean, I would suggest something like: www.myserver.com/portfolio/project1 , www.myserver.com/portfolio/project2 , etc. What's even better then, is that you could just link to all of these separate projects from the main portfolio site, like www.myserver.com (or www.myserver.com/portfolio if you must).

As for the fake sites, which I just call mock-ups, by no means purchase separate hosting accounts. Just put them all on one account - he wants to see your design and development skills, not your purchasing power =) If you're unsure what to do for mock-up sites, just imagine various companies or individuals approaching you and needing websites. You could make a website for an imaginary wedding photographer, a band, a telecommunications company, etc. If you want good examples of what level of content should be on a mock site, take a look at places like www.templatemonster.com - people there design mock websites for a living. Basically you need just enough content for the design to work, but none of it really has to make sense. In fact I suggest using latin to fill all your copy spaces, and www.lipsum.com can generate that for you. The only time you'd actually need content to test with is if you were developing some sort of application like a CMS.

2. So, onto CMS: Joomla! is just one of the many various CMS out there - CMS meaning Content Management System. Like Fang said, people use CMS to... manage their content. CMS is powerful because the good ones are user friendly and allow people to maintain and contribute to websites with ease. Designing your own fully-featured CMS is no small undertaking, but a light one wouldn't be too terrible to work on. Perhaps you could design a small application that employees for a fake video store use to clock in and clock out, add notes about their lunch breaks, etc.

I hope all this helps, and best of luck to you!