Creating Demo sites for Portfolio

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1

Hi,

I’m slowly picking up my skill base of both front end and back end web development and want to properly start freelancing after having my hand involved with a few little projects to help friends with websites they wanted but nothing to present on my portfolio as such.

I have a couple of questions, if someone would kindly offer some guidance that would be great:

I will be using WordPress to build my portfolio and would like to give my potential customers through the portfolio a glimpse of the admin end of both WordPress CMS and other e-commerce CMSes (e.g. PrestaShop).

My main question regards how I can offer such, these will be for demonstration purposes only with no possibility of practically purchasing through the e-commerce demo and I assume using WordPress Multisite would best for this for those projects built upon WordPress - what settings do you suggest I have for this to be allowing prospective clients a feel for what WordPress can offer.

Secondly, I wish to use subdomains for my portfolio, such as design.mydomain and marketing.mydomain - would creating WordPress multisite sites be a good way of each having their own separate blog and features or any particular other ways of handling it.

Many thanks. I’m bound to have more questions as I progress.

Kind Regards

Fred Gough

2

Opinion: I suspect that you are severely limiting yourself by choosing Wordpress for your portfolio-building.

Giving potential customers a glimpse of Wordpress admin: why not do video screen captures?

However, I know you can choose a hosting service and it will allow you to create subdomains. You’ll have to research this on your own. Googling “hosting subdmains” should turn up a few ideas.

3

Thank you for your opinion and ideas. I will take into consideration what you have said and continue to think of ways I can produce the best results.

4

There’s a few approaches here:

  1. Screenshots
    use images+ descriptions to show key functionality
    easy and quick to do

  2. Videos
    good for showing how things look and work
    relatively easy to do, extra time editing videos, retaking if they go wrong etc

  3. Demo sites
    if you want people to actually do hands on you could set up some custom demo installs with logins
    they will get abused so you could reset the database say every hour
    lock off certain functionality, eg ability to send emails from the CMS

  4. Link to existing demos
    many OS systems have demos available, either on their own sites (like Prestashop) or via somewhere like http://www.opensourcecms.com/

5

Thanks. I appreciate your input. I shall explore my options when wire framing my portfolio.

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