I recently joined a mentoring group for a group of promising urban poor junior college students. One of the two kids under my wing has assembled a hefty portfolio of mainly minority newspaper/magazine articles. During a recent interview, a hiring official suggested she make her portfolio available electronically, rather than bringing a hard copy into an interview with her or attaching a portfolio to her email. (He said it’s easier to click on a website, rather than route papers or attached emailed documents throughout an organization, which is true.) The idea, I surmise, is for her to send them her link via email.
I’ve zero experience with the world of low-cost Internet posting. Is there a very inexpensive way to do this–that doesn’t involve a web address that’s 50 characters long or having to pay a website host money she doesn’t have?
Someone suggested a free blog host, but I’m wondering about alternatives.
http://www.freeservers.com/ has a free web hosting option. I haven’t used them in some years, but when I did, I got a free, short domain name, with '.8m" tacked in the middle.
Their free web hosting is supported by ads. Here’s an example: www.jenniger.8m.com (I’m a better web designer now - honest!).
Freeservers puts an ad at the top, but otherwise they mostly leave you alone.
Having a .com domain name (without ads) isn’t always expensive. www.doteasy.com, which I use, costs $25 US a year. The hosting is free, but the domain registration is $25. As an added bonus, you get 10 E-mail accounts at your domain name (eg. me@mydomainname.com).
If the group of students all want to post their work electronically, they could split the cost and create a website together.
I think the idea of a deidcated domain and website has some advantages.
It is fairly cheap. Mine cost me $85 dollars for the first year with a $15 domain registration fee. It will be $70 after that. All hosting is included with tons of tools to make a professional looking site with not a lot of experience. That includes more space than they can conceivably use. I believe most of the low-cost or free options will have a low space limit that will restrict the number of documents with multimedia that they can fit.
You can get your own name or a variation as a domain name as long as it is somewhat uncommon and that makes a great impression.
I take it that these students are interested in some type of media. Web experience is valuable to many of those jobs.
You control everything that is on your space and you can store things there, accessible from anywhere regardless of whether you
The documents on your website are backups in case something happens to the original. You have access to them anywhere there is an internet connection.
Setting up a basic website takes only a few hours and it is a great thing to know about in and of itself.
Don’t forget there may be some expense in converting the documents into electronic, and hence postable, form. I suggest a survery of what xomputer gear these kids and/or their parents have, both hardware and software. A color scanner of reasonably high resolution is a must if any artwork is involved. If there are newsprint articles that can’t be physically cut down to fit within the scanner’s imaging size, then they’ll need some software to splice images together.
Also, in my experience, corporate HR people are not the most computer literate people, and relatively few of them would have the tools at hand to visit a website during the course of an interview. If the person arranging the interview says “Bring your portfolio”, BRING it, in hand, on paper, unless arrangements are made in advance for viewing over the internet.
IMO, a poorly-done Web site with a URL a mile long is worse than a hard copy portfolio. If he’s going to do the Web site, do it right & make it look professional. Otherwise, stick to the hard copy. Chances are he’s going to have to stick to the hard copy much of the time anyway - people are more used to that.
Put it this way: I’m a software engineer. The people I would potentially interview with are in the top rungs of computer literacy. I would never consider only posting a resume online (I’d do it in addition to a hard copy and/or email version), or including the things typically asked for (code examples) online. Hard copy is the way to go, IMO.