Your prescription for increased productivity and profitability
Adobe has just added another enticement for becoming a Creative Cloud member: Behance ProSite
In case Behance is new to you (as it was to me), Behance is a social media platform designed just for creative professionals who want to showcase and share their work with the world.
As of the end of March, you can have your own ProSite portfolio web site at no additional cost if you are a paid Creative Cloud complete member. (The normal cost for this service is $100 per year.) The projects you add to Behance are transformed into a fully customized personal portfolio site with your own URL, similar to http://your_name_here.prosite.com. Your professional portfolio site stays in sync with your Behance projects, helping your work get more exposure from their 18+ million visitors every month.
If you’re ready to get started building and customizing your Behance ProSite, here are the steps listed at blogs.adobe.com.
Not a member, you can get started with a free Creative Cloud membership using the “Get Started” link under the Behance icon. When you are ready, move up to a Creative Cloud complete plan or team plan, and you will get ProSite bundled in.
To see how the process worked, I decided to try it myself. Why not! I have a Creative Cloud account, and a few pieces of my creative work sitting on my hard drive. So I took the following steps:
I started gleaning a few pieces of my work, opened them in Photoshop and resampled them down to around 4×6 or 5×7 inches and saved as JPEG. (I tried a TIFF image, but that format was rejected.) You can have one, or many, images for each project you create. Each project requires a cover image. You can use one of your images or use a thumbnail but this must be at least 404 by 316 pixels in size.
You will also want to have an image of yourself, your logo, or other image for identification.
Next, I logged into Behance (www.behance.net/account/login) using my Adobe ID.
Under the Activity tab on the next page, I clicked on Getting Started. I put a minimum of information in my profile and chose a couple of creatives to follow. If you are serious about this, you might want to have your latest reusme handy for completing your profile. (I still have lots to do before mine is complete.)
The big blue button on the Getting Started page labeled “Upload My First Project” is hard to miss. I clicked it.
The next window had another big blue button for Uploadig Files. I selected a few files to upload and clicked on the choose button.
In the next page (Content), I clicked the Edit button and named the project.
Next I added an image for the cover.
In the Settings dialog, I selected the Creative Field my project best fits into (best guess). I gave it some tags for search identification, and added a short description of the Project.
Could not quite decide whether the project should be visible to Everyone at Behance, Specific Members, or a Feedback Circle. I finally selected Everyone at Behance.
The last option is to decide if you want to allow comments on your project. Why not?
You can save your project as a draft, or publish.
Being the brave soul that I am, I clicked Publish
Once you click the Publish button, you can share your work on Twitter, Facebook, or Linked In. I skipped this option for now.
Now that I had some projects to place on a website, I then selected ProSite from the My Portfolio tab. (Notice that you can also access your Profile page, Work Experience Page, and My Work page from this tab.
Creating the ProSite web page was as simple as creating the projects: decide on a page design template and select the Projects to be added from the list at the top of the sidebar. Drag the selected projects into the Gallery list below.
Your last step before publishing is to open the Settings panel to add a few persoal touches.
Once you are happy with your website layout, hit the Publish button. You can continue to make edits later.
Ok, so creating the basic website was just the tip of the iceberg. You then go on to customize the template, add pages and links, and add meta tags for search optimization. You can find out more about creating your website at http://www.creativebloq.com. It looks as if I have a lot more to do before my site is complete, but you can take a look at what I have started at shirley-hopkins.prosite.com. (It may take a day or two before it becomes live.)
Hope to see you there!