On this page, you should provide a more detailed but easily browsable/skimmable version of the “education” section of your resume/cv.
It will neither look good nor make much sense to only include what your paper resume has on a separate page: you will have a CV page where you include the full content of your CV (minus personal information at the top). So, you should use this page to add text, hyperlinks, and media–allowing your reader/visitor to see the meat of your undergraduate (and maybe also high school, if feasible) education. [view more]
It makes sense to add details in a toggle field like this if you don’t have sub-pages within your Education section. I suggest that you keep your landing page short if you want visitors to also go to your sub-pages, although it is also possible to visually design the main page to make it very quickly skimmable, to link to the sub-pages, and to explicitly tell the visitor what you cover in the sub-pages. Just imagine how visitors of various types might respond, navigate, and engage with your pages, considering particularly how you’d like to engage the audience of your primary interest or expectation.Most visitors will only skim through your professional portfolio pages–indeed, when they see the substance in the pages, they may simply get the visual impression that you “something” to say about your four years of university education; even though little or no substance on your portfolio won’t necessarily say that you have nothing to say, it does mean that you are missing the opportunity to say something and to make a positive impression.
Here are things we discussed in class with regard to what kinds of elements the web allows you to add–in this and other pages:
- Hyperlink (internal, such as your own blog entries, pages included in and excluded from the navigation; external, such as university sites and external sites)
- Media (images–your own, representing what you’ve done; just-for-visual-appeal kind of images from Creative Common sources; videos–embedded; any animation; etc)
- Visual Elements: bold (words and sentences), italics, underline; color; headings and subheadings; pull quotes; etc.
- Samples of your work–as pages if appropriate, or as hyperlinked extra pages or posts
- Expand/collapse or “read more” feature
- What else?
The bullet points under the education section should become full paragraphs and even more than one paragraphs if you have more to say. [view more]
Only a minority of visitors may carefully read the contents of your pages (beyond the headings and otherwise visually inviting parts of the page (plus, maybe the beginning of your paragraphs). But it’s that minority that matters most. So, for anyone who goes beyond browsing the pages and skimming their contents, do provide details about your education. Say something about what your learned (in general, in the courses that you took within your major and minor, and beyond coursework), what you think about your undergraduate education, where you see yourself going with your knowledge and skills, what you value most, etc. If the visitor does not see anything beyond what you already have in your one- or two-page resume, you are missing an important opportunity that the project is designed to help you with—and you are not fulfilling the assignment.
You should try to retain a little bit of “resume” look if you can; you can do this if you can find a way to add the expand/collapse function. You should also try to keep the overall page limited to, say, 300-500 words, unless you believe your content will be highly engaging to the audience. The engagement should also come from the integration of media in an appropriate manner within the page. You should expect the majority of the audience/visitors to “see” not read your pages. See some examples on this page.