In a nutshell, Masher is a free tool that you can sign in using your Facebook or you can create an account. According to the website, Masher allows you to “Mix your photos, music, text and special effects to create professional looking videos in minutes.”

Masher will be a great tool for me to learn how to use because I can create videos and make them look professional which will be useful in the future if I ever need to do that for work.

I chose to use the theme Pachyderm by Caroline Moore. I also customized the theme by adding widgets and a header image. I created a static welcome page with an about me section and a photograph of myself. I also set up all of my pages and customized my menu.

Why I Did It… 

I chose Pachyderm as my theme because it is a very clean, modern, vibrant, and playful theme. I think that it is a perfect mix of professionalism mixed with aspects of my personality, so it is the perfect fit for an online portfolio that is showcasing my professional work.

The widgets that I chose to add were a search bar, a recent posts section, a category section that is organized by project, and a calendar of all of my past posts. I think that these widgets all serve to make my site extremely easy to navigate – these widgets serve as immediately apparent and available tools for a user to search through my site in order to find what they are looking for.

I chose to make my about me into a static welcome page in order to make the blog feel more like a website, and therefore feel more professional. I included a header image of myself that is displayed on each page and a photo of myself on the welcome page in order to incorporate visuals and to make the website more personal.

I set the menu up with a home page, my blog page, and then a page for each project in chronological order of completion, and finally the site information page.