WordPress Portfolio Site: Pages or Posts?

  • Hi guys

    After months (years) of tearing my hair out trying to design my own design portfolio site (perhaps the hardest job for a designer) I have decided to use WordPress to power it and keep the presentation simple.

    I intend to run a blog alongside my portfolio, so while the blog entries will function as normal and be listed on a ‘Blog’ page, I was wondering what the best way to approach the actual Portfolio section would be.

    I will have a ‘Portfolio’ page on the site, within which I will show the design projects. The question is:

    Should I create the design projects as ‘Portfolio’ sub-pages or posts with a specific category?

    If I use pages, then I get more complete control over the appearance of the projects and can associate a custom page template to them. Each project will have a nice neat /portfolio/project type permalink and it will also not show the age of any of the projects…

    But…

    If I use posts then the projects will be searchable within the site, as well as having categories, so I could list all website projects for instance on a Portfolio index page, or show a ‘recent projects’ panel.

    I guess I’m worried about pages not having categories, portfolio project posts being truncated, or at the prospect of my personal blog and design portfolio getting mixed together in search results, but perhaps the right tweaking of code can ensure they are always presented entirely separately…

    In summary, I’m unsure – What does anyone here think? Has anyone approached this from either way and have some advice or suggestions? Seems a shame not to harness the full power of the WP database for the projects as well as the blog posts…

    Cheers!

    ?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • May be of benefit:
    https://bloghelper.is-there.net/how-to-use-wordpress-for-a-portfolio-site-part-1/
    https://hbarrett.wordpress.com/how-to/

    its like i wrote this myself, i have exactly the same problem !

    Thread Starter shirohagen

    (@shirohagen)

    Thanks for the links, I’m still struggling with it, but I’ve gone with Hemingway as a theme and I’m going to put my projects on there as posts, under a portfolio category. That way I can modify the sidebar etc to separate the blog posts from portfolio posts, and use a different page template to show them too. So far I think it’s the best way as the projects will be searchable, indexable and categorisable (if those are words) I just thought the pages option was a bit to static, after all, the power of wordpress is in the posts.

    I’ll post a link once I’ve got it all sorted out…

    ?

    Hey Shirohagen,
    how did you end up going with your site? I’m looking to do the exact same thing, so am interested to see how you went.

    I have a web design site and struggled with the same thing for awhile. I personally ended up featuring our portfolio on pixelpost.

    However, we have decided to present portfolio projects as posts in addition to having the separate pixelpost-driven eye candy for them to look at.

    We created categories for different kinds of projects. The front page has two loops going, the first one is for the latest post (Latest News). The second loop contains post excerpts only and only if they are in the “Site Launch” category. Clicking on them takes you to the full post (single.php) page. There I have a plugin that lists the latest projects in the Site Launch category.

    Most of the site contains static pages. This seems to work for us.

    I don’t want to get slammed here for posting a link to my site but it is in my profile and you are welcome to check it out there to see how I’ve done things.

    Ha ha. Bad karma. The site is down for the time being. ??

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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