Free Simple Portfolio Theme for WordPress

All images from Need Supply Co.

 

 

Over the last year or so I’ve gotten a lot of requests from friends to help them make a website. Most of the types of projects happen to be either a blog or a portfolio site. After looking into and experimenting with different portfolio options available, I set out to lay down a basic framework I could use for similar projects in the future.

I chose WordPress as a portfolio CMS because the platform was one people were already familiar with, was easy to set up (most host providers have one click installations), and had already seen it done effectively. WordPress development was something I had a little experience with so it was fun exploring it further.

Although this isn’t anything new, and it might not be the best portfolio theme out there, I wanted to make this available to everyone because I feel its a simple solution and enough to get the ball rolling with your own portfolio.

The theme isn’t perfect but this is my first time putting something out there for public use. I wanted this to be an open project, something I expect to keep updating, improving, and adding new features to (not to mention fixing bugs I might have missed).

How it works

For those of you who aren’t following along (and don’t know what the hell is a CMS), this is a theme for the blogging platform WordPress. But instead of using it for publishing blog posts, it uses the platform’s functionality of writing a blog to show off your projects through images and text.

Content is broken into ‘projects’, with each project being made up of several images, a description, and additional details.

Example of a project page

 

Project images can span multiple widths.

There is also support for WordPress’ ‘Pages’, so you can set up About or Contact pages.

This theme was intended as a simple, quick, and easy solution for anyone needing to put a portfolio online. You can use it for your graphic design work, photography, even videos. The minimalistic theme was designed so that what is featured is the quality of your work. No fancy textures, colours, or effects. Just exactly what you need to get your work seen and appreciated.

Posting your first project

If you’ve ever used WordPress before, creating a project is very, very easy. The theme takes advantage of WordPress’ user friendly admin area and publishing features.

1) From the WordPress dashboard, click ‘Add New Project’ under the ‘Projects’ menu on the right hand side of the screen.

2) Give your project a title.

3) To begin uploading images to your project, hit the image icon where it reads ‘Upload/Insert’.

4) Follow the image upload form to upload images from your computer or from elsewhere on the internet. Once the image is ready, hit ‘Insert Into Post’. Read below under ‘Tips’ for tips on media setting recommendations. Repeat this step for each image you want to include for this project.

5) Make sure each image is on a seperate line, and not side by side. You can do this by hitting Enter after every image upload. Though, you can get creative and have images on the same line if you play around with image sizes.

6) Add a description for your project

7) Add any additional project details, for example the link to said project or the project type.

8) Click ‘Set featured image’ to set the thumbnail image that will show up on the home page. The thumbnail will be cropped and resized for you.

9) Hit publish! Congrats, you just made your first project.

Tips

  • You can set the image sizes so that images are automatically resized for you. You can find the settings under Settings > Media. I would set the Max Width of the medium image size to 610 px and the Max Width of the large image size to 920 px. This will ensure the images of your project pages won’t break the layout.
  • The featured images are separate from the images in your project. Take advantage of the separate upload and design thumbnails specifically for the homepage. The thumbnail size is 300 x 300 px.

Resources

I’ll be sure to add any links here that I find useful for anyone who have never used WordPress before or anyone else using this theme.

Please feel free to leave any comments, concerns, and questions in the comment form below. I’ll try my best to get back to you as soon as I can. I hope there’s at least one person out there that will find this useful.