The portfolio I have chosen to critique is simply titled “My Electronic Portfolio” and is authored by Dr. Helen Barrett. It is located at http://electronicportfolios.org/myportfolio/index.html. The portfolio has pages on the following subjects: her biography, her reflections, her goals, and pages that have examples of her competency. The design of this portfolio is very poor and the site isn’t easily navigable.

 

The first thing one sees when viewing this portfolio is a large image of the author’s head. It is a bit unflattering and shows up on every page of the portfolio. I find it annoying and a bit creepy. The image would be okay if it was a bit smaller and only in the biography; however, it is a bit too much to have it on every page. According to the site, the picture of her is a link to the home page. If one didn’t read this, they would have never known. On the main page, there isn’t a very well laid out menu. Some of the links are in mid-sentences, there is a brief list on the left side of the page, and there is a list of her competencies. The site hasn’t been updated since 2004, which shows a lack of devotion to the site. Furthermore, the website is just named “My Electronic Portfolio”. This title isn’t a very good one; it is very generic. Another aspect of content that I noticed was that I could not find her résumé. There are many examples of skills but no easy to read résumé. The background image of the site detracts from the professionalism. It uses a  pattern that consists of grey cartoonish explosion-like shapes on a light grey background. This background picture on the home page and node pages makes it more difficult to read the text and reduces contrast.

 

The strongest part about this portfolio, while still weak, is it’s content. There are many links to examples of her work such as publications on electronic portfolios, digital storytelling, technology, teaching and instructional design, and writing and assessment. The names of the links have the URL underneath them; this is kind of distracting and unnecessary in my opinion. One good point are the descriptions under the links which are helpful. Many of the links on the node pages go to sites also made by the author of the portfolio, but no links back to the portfolio website. Other than an e-mail address, the author does not provide any contact information. There is so much content on this site that it makes it hard to find it all. navigation is difficult because of the many types of websites that she has. While you can get to them all, they are not interconnected. This means that you can get stuck at a dead end with no way to get back other than using your browser’s history. Without looking at every path, you will have no idea what all the content she has to offer is. There isn’t a site map present which would help things a lot. The pages need to be better organized into a hierarchy based on which each page has. Many of the different pages and other site that pages link to were created at different times and with different programs; therefore, there is no consistency or uniformity among the pages.

 

The above picture shows the home page of the portfolio. As you can see, her picture sits prominently on the left side. Though the site has many good examples of the author’s work, there still appears to  be a picture of her somewhere on every page. For example, this one movie examples has her picture at the beginning zooming out. The same picture is both repetitive and annoying. Furthermore, her home page has a few short paragraphs of writing that tell about the website that are a bit hard to read against the background pattern. Many people wouldn’t read this text when looking at the portfolio. While a good introduction, it is kind of distraction from the links. Her home page also lacks her name in a large font. Instead of “My Electronic Portfolio” in large font at the top of the page, she should have her name. On each of the pages that are linked to, the style changes. The inconsistent style of the site and examples makes the portfolio look less organized and difficult to navigate. Each of the examples sites also do not have a link back to the home page. While the node pages listing competencies have links back to the node page, they do not have a menu or links to other node pages. If I have my browser displaying the web pages at full screen, I get long lines of text that are hard to follow and don’t look very good. paragraphs of text on her pages expand horizontally to fill the browser window which causes elements on the page to move as the window resizes. This will causes viewing problems for users of low and high resolution displays.

 

By looking at this portfolio, the first think I think is to make sure I do not use a picture of myself on the home page. If I were to make a biography, a link to a picture of me might be okay. I also do not want to use a background pattern or image on my site; it detracts from the content. Either a solid color or gradient would be my best choice. In contrast to this portfolio, I would use a main menu on the home page to the other pages on the site. I would also put links on the other pages on my site to other pages. In addition to an e-mail address, I will post other contact information including links to other websites I have. The content of my portfolio will mostly be writings which I will display on the web pages and offer as downloadable PDF files rather than the links that she has. I will also try to keep text on the pages from moving when the window is resized using tables. Based on other flaws that I noted, I will try to keep the design of all the pages as uniform as possible in order to make looking at the site easy on the user. Using this portfolio as an example, I have found many design and content flaws to avoid. I feel that looking through many good and bad portfolios has aided me in making decisions on creating and designing my own portfolio.