Website Link: www.shrutivij.art
To establish a professional online presence, I developed my own portfolio website, www.shrutivij.art. The process was driven by the need for technical stability, optimised user experience, and personal branding.
I secured my domain name and hosting via GoDaddy, and used WordPress as a flexible content management system. I selected a simple, memorable domain; my name, shortened, followed by the .art top-level domain.
For the site’s appearance, I tried many classic WordPress themes that looked immediately beautiful, but whose rigidity and inefficiency reduced long-term customisability. Kuwahara, for instance, relied on post-based images to create a masonry-style portfolio. I chose Astra for its robust customisability and performance without compromising the page-load speed.
Displaying artwork efficiently was a challenge. I tested the Nextgen gallery plugin, but found it restrictive and buggy. FooGallery meanwhile offered superior backend asset management, vital for long-term media organisation. Within FooGallery, I chose a masonry grid layout to preserve native image aspect ratios without the visual monotony of a portfolio grid. The plugin’s default lightbox setup allowed the site to load lower-resolution thumbnails quickly, while users can click and view images at full scale nonetheless. I also tweaked the loading animations, zoom icons, and pagination settings.
On the frontend, I prioritised intuitive navigation. I implemented custom HTML anchor links on buttons so users could jump to specific portfolio categories.
To ensure visual cohesion, I recycled assets from my previous portfolio (including the custom header and logo) and customised the global colours and typography using Astra’s Style Guide to match the purple scheme.
Finally, I optimised the site layout for both desktop and mobile users. I adjusted the content containers to a narrower layout to remove awkward negative spaces and removed any unnecessary metadata (such as the author’s name) from posts for a cleaner look.