Marketing strategy and reflection

My goal by the end of 2021 is to be in a role that I can utilize my new UX and website skills. This can be achieved in three ways.

  1. Re-negotiating my current role to include UX and website duties. I currently work within a digital content team and work closely with the channels team. My additional tasks can include uploading and layout of news and feature articles to the group website (Tank CMS) and work with the channels team on the new intranet site by interviewing staff to create persona’s, card sorting, and UX layouts of the new intranet site.

  2. A secondment or role change within my current employment. Currently, there are 10 people in the UX team. I will share more portfolio website with UX team leaders, arrange one-day internships, and applying for internal roles.

  3. Apply for a new role. For this LinkedIn and personal recommendations are key. My aim is the drive my current LinkedIn profile views to my new portfolio website. This showcases my skills and experience highlighting my UX and website skills. I can achieve this by being more active on LinkedIn, posting current work, self tagging team posts, and sharing blogs.

Image of Linkedin Profile page with link to new portfolio website.

Choice of plugins

Oshine from ThemeForest was the theme I chose for my site. Within the theme was demo v.29. I uploaded that demo and all of the plugins required to run that theme.

I also uploaded three additional plugins.

  1. Yoast duplicate post was installed for efficiency when creating portfolio pages. Once I created three different portfolios, I could ‘clone’ and replace them with a new folio image and content.

  2. The second plug-in’s in Smush, which allows you to optimize images without losing quality to make your site load faster. As my portfolio site has a lot of images, this is beneficial for both upload speed and SEO. The total savings was 48.9MB.

  3. As an additional analytics review, Moster Insights was uploaded as well. I’m most interested in how people are finding my site and what pages they are viewing the longest.

SEO & analytics strategy

To achieve optimal SEO, I concentrated on:

  • Key phrases

  • Metadata descriptions

  • Description sentences to 150 word length

  • Adding live email and mobile contact details to the footer as additional links

I will monitor through Monster Insights and google analytics where traffic to my site is coming from and what pages are viewed the most. This will allow me to alter keywords etc to that target. 

Security & performance

Panthur was my choice when purchasing a domain name and choosing a hosting site. Panthur is set up to provide the fastest, reliable, and secure web hosting service possible. As a new user, I felt the high level of support was also an important factor. As a portfolio site, keeping it simple, secure and without any complications is my strategy.
The following plugins have also been installed to secure my site.

  • Wordfence: A endpoint firewall and malware scanner

  • Really Simple SSL: detects your settings and configures your website to run over HTTPS.

  • Google Analytics: to help you analyze your website traffic.

  • MosterInsights: plugin for WordPress by Google Analytics to easily see how my site is performing

  • Akkeba backup: creates a full site backup including my database, files, and the restoration script

Hosted vs. Self-Hosted

Working with both Squarespace and WordPress, I can understand the positives and negatives of both. I found Squarespace easy to use with a range of templates that were beautifully designed. However, for someone like me, who is particular with design and likes things to be perfect, I found it limiting.

Flip the coin to WordPress where every space can be changed by a pixel and you can create any design you want which is great at first. However, as a first time user, I found it difficult to navigate all the options and intricacies of WordPress

If I was taking on a project by myself next, I would use Squarespace but if I had the support of someone with experience in WordPress that would be my choice. WordPress is a superior hosted site and with more experience will become more enjoyable!