Building Portfolio

We at Portfoliopen spent years of research, development and testing to make things simple and intuitive, that's why your use of Portfoliopen service should be easy without reading a manual. However, for those of you who like to read manuals, we wrote these help pages, so enjoy your reading. If you cannot find an answer here, feel free to contact us with any of your questions.

Dashboard

Dashboard is the first page you see when you sign in. At the top of the page you see the total number of your works and the overall rating of your portfolio. The overall rating is calculated as the sum of all ratings for all your artworks. Below you see your current subscription plan details. You can upgrade to another plan at any time you find yourself needing additional features or more works to upload.

The announcements block will keep you up to date with everything happening at Portfoliopen. The most recent comments posted on your works will be shown at the bottom of the page. At the right of each comment you see the total number of comments for the artwork.

Portfolio Sections

Before you can add any artworks to the portfolio, you need to create some sections. Sections are the way to organize and classify artworks by types, for example: logotypes, icons, websites etc. When creating a new section, please select the appropriate section type for it. You can easily rearrange the sections by dragging and dropping them.

Notice the actions menu at the right where you can choose to edit the section, hide or delete it. If you delete a section, it will be deleted permanently including all the containing artworks. Instead of deleting, you can hide a section from being displayed on your portfolio website. When you click the section name you should see all artworks in that section. Like the sections, you can rearrange the artworks by dragging and dropping them.

Adding Artworks

When you finish with the sections, you're ready to add artworks. You will get a popup window asking you to enter the artwork name and short description. After that, you'll be taken to a page where you can upload images and enter the artwork details. It's possible to upload several files at once, allowed image formats are png, jpg, and gif.

After uploading images you'll see their thumbnails and the artwork cover area on the left side. To set a cover image you should either click a thumbnail and press the "Set Cover" button, or you can simply drag a thumbnail from the list and drop it into the cover area. If you hide an image, it will not appear in the artwork gallery but you still can use it for the cover. You can easily rearrange images by dragging and dropping them in any order you would like them to be displayed in the artwork gallery.

If you mark some of your artworks as featured, they will be shown on the main page to make your portfolio more attractive. It's possible to hide an artwork from being displayed in the portfolio, turn off the rating feature and disable comments.

The comments link will take you to the page where you can edit existing comments, write a reply, email the author, post a new comment by yourself and delete comments you don't like. You can also attach a file to the artwork, it can be a vector source file, high-resolution image etc.

Private Artworks

You can make some of your works private, they will be hidden from the public and accessible only by a private link. It can be useful when you need to only allow access for certain people and hide the works from anyone else. If you change the existing password, a new link will be generated and the old link will no longer work.

Your Profile

The profile page contains your user profile data. Here you can write some information about yourself, list your professional skills, enter your location, phone number, change your account password and email address. Please do not enter any links in the "About You" area, they will be shown as a plain text. There is a form at the bottom of the page where you can add links to external websites, for example, your blog, company website and so on.

To display your avatar picture you should enter the email address associated with your Gravatar account just in case it's different from your primary email at Portfoliopen. If you're not using Gravatar service, you can read more and register at gravatar.com website. Gravatar is an image linked with your email address that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.

If you're using Twitter and Flickr, you can show your recent tweets and photos in the portfolio. You can also list the IM services you're signed up for as an alternate way to contact you.