Your ePortfolio site will reflect your professionalism and your goals, but it should also highlight your creativity and interests. Selecting your theme and customizing your site is like decorating your home — it reflects your personality and suits the purpose of the space. Although you may be using your ePortfolio for course work initially, you may also add pages and posts about your interests and experience.
Theme, Header Image, and Tagline
Themes are website templates. They are designed by professionals, so the colors and text styles work together, but you may customize to your liking or needs. When choosing a theme, remember that your content will not only include the text you are adding to your site but also the images. Some themes include stock images for the header or featured content.
- Most themes include a header (or banner) image at the top of the page and a tagline. To change your theme, go to Appearances > Themes. You may preview a theme before selecting it. You may change your theme as often as you would like. Content (such as posts, images, pages) is saved on your site, but it may be displayed differently from theme to theme. Some themes also include tutorials to demonstrate customization choices, such as the default Ashe theme.
- To change your header image and tagline, go to Appearances> Customize or click the customize button from the short cut menu at the top. Some students use the tagline to share their philosophy about learning or life, while others select a thought-provoking quote. Others simply welcome visitors or state the student’s major or year of anticipated graduation.
- You may customize your header image to include a photo you took or image you created, or you may want a professional Creative Commons or royalty free image. Consider using unsplash.com for your header image (select “small” image size when downloading and copy attribution to acknowledge the creator by adding a paragraph widget).
Widgets
Widgets are meant to help visitors navigate the site or to offer additional global content (content and navigation that is visible from the home page as well as on all posts and pages). All themes allow customization of widgets from Appearances>Widgets or from the short cut menu at the top.
Different themes have different options for the location of the widget. Select a location (sidebars, footer, etc). Click the + sign in the top left to add a block, such as Paragraph text, Search, or Categories. New widgets are added to the bottom but can be adjusted by selecting and toggling them up or down (see image below). Click “update” to save the change. If you change your theme, you may need to adjust your site’s widgets.
Images & Media
Your ePortfolio site cannot host large files due to the volume of UNE Portfolio sites (the maximum size file that can be uploaded is 5 MB). The Media Library is where images and files are uploaded and stored. When adding images to your posts or pages, you may need to resize them or save them in .jpeg or .png file format if they are in an incompatible format. If you view the files in list format, you can see how/where the image is being used.
- Click here to learn about enlarging the image when a visitor clicks on the image.
- Galleries are a collection of images. Using the Gallery block, you can add several related images. Click here to learn more about using gallery blocks.
- Every image on your ePortfolio site should include “alt text” so that people who rely on screen readers are able to understand the reason for the image. If the image is decorative, the alt text can be “decorative image of…” To learn more about images in your ePortfolio, click here.
Customizing Blocks
