If you are in the Site Admin area, click on the Gallery link on the left to go to the default gallery main page. This Gallery page is the entrance to your portfolio and at this point it is empty. Where do we go from here?
You can think of this Gallery as a big filing cabinet. If you wanted to put all your artwork into this cabinet, you will not want to just lump it all together. We need to set up a system for categorizing the art so that it will be easy to find later.
The first question you need to ask is what are the main purposes for this portfolio. For example, my portfolio has two main purposes. The first is a way to display artwork available for licensing. I can assign a username and password to a potential manufacturer or publisher who wishes to view the artwork. The second purpose is to have an easy way to show proofs to my existing clients. For example, when I'm working on an ecard animation for Pamela Gladding Ecards, I upload a preview of the animation for feedback from Pamela and her staff. They can log into the PG Ecards album and watch the animation preview. This is much easier than sending them the Flash swf file for each stage of the project development.
So how would we set up Gallery 2 to perform these two tasks. Because the default Gallery will become the main page of the portfolio, we can rename it from "Gallery" to "Portfolio". We can think of this as our filing cabinet. Inside this portfolio/filing cabinet, we will have a Clients Area and an Art for Licensing area.
Portfolio
- Clients Area
- Art for Licenting
The Art for Licensing area will contain many albums of art collections. Most of the art I sell is Halloween and Christmas art. These are the two biggest selling areas in art licensing. I also sell Flash animations. So I will need at least three major albums within the Art for Licensing section.
Portfolio
- Clients Area
- Art for Licenting
- Halloween
- Christmas
- Animations
The Clients Area will contain an album for each of my clients. As I mentioned earlier, I will need an album for PG Ecards. Also, I am a graphic artist for DIYeStores. I create custom graphics for the DIYeStores clients and I need a way for the clients to preview the proofs. The Clients Area will have an album for DIYeStores and inside will be an album for each of these clients.
Portfolio
- Clients Area
- PG Ecards
- DIYeStores
- Client 1
- Client 2
- Art for Licenting
Here's the structure for my portfolio.
Portfolio
- Clients Area
- PG Ecards
- DIYeStores
- Client 1
- Client 2
- Art for Licenting
- Halloween
- Christmas
- Animations
Now, let's set up Gallery 2 to match this structure.
