BT Media Productions

I started this website as a component of Dr. Lucas’ Writing for Digital Media class. I already had a portfolio website up on another domain (which I have since taken down), but this one is much more robust. The class has covered from purchasing a domain name and web hosting all the way through how to install a CMS and add content. All of the class materials can be accessed on the LitMUSE website. And be sure to check out my fellow classmates’ portfolios. I decided through making this site, to start marketing myself as a “Media Professional,” hence the domain name and headline. A more straightforward domain, like brandonthompson (dot) com was not available, but I’m glad that I chose the one that I did.

There are many options today for a content management system. They each have their pros and cons. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal– all free and open-source– are what I consider to be the best. I ran a Joomla site for MSC-TV. I haven’t had the best experience with it, though I understand that it is a very powerful CMS. I think that most of my problems with it have stemmed from the fact that the MSC website department didn’t install it correctly and I was unable to install any plugins. I have not used Drupal before. I understand that it is a powerful tool, but does not have a lot of support behind it. So, I chose WordPress for this portfolio site. I’ve been quite happy with it so far. I love the mass amounts of plug-ins and how easy it is to automatically install them from the backend. What I don’t like about it is how it is difficult to make the site, as a whole, NOT look like a blog. It is possible, and I think that I was somewhat successful in presenting a portfolio site and not a blog site, but it is difficult to do with most templates.

I’m particularly proud of my header image. It is intended to look like a bird’s eye view of a desk with polaroids from different projects that I have worked on. To do this, I took a background image of a desk WordPress template and used it for my background. Then, I took screencaps from my video projects using Quicktime. After converting those images to JPG, I put the images through the program Poladroid. Finally, I put those images on top of the desk image in Photoshop, made them look scattered, and that was it! I took a little bit of inspiration from the different desk themes for WordPress, but for the most part, I came up with this on my own. Feel free to take inspiration from my idea for your own site– just please make it your own in some sort of way!

For anyone who has or is thinking about making a site of their own, I’d like to point out the importance of having what is called a favicon. From Wikipedia, a favicon is, “a 16×16 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page’s favicon in the browser’s Address bar and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks.” Basically, it’s that little icon that shows up next to the URL or bookmark in a browser. I think that having a favicon really makes your site stand out. For those of you also making a portfolio site, it gives you a better branding. It can be difficult getting something that looks clear in a 16 x 16 image, but just having something there really makes a difference. “BT” was an easy choice for me.