Choosing your template for a portfolio site

- Now that you have a good overview of what Adobe Portfolio is and some of its controls, let's build a new site from scratch. To do this, make sure you log in to portfolio.adobe.com or myportfolio.com. Once you do, you'll see the option to create a new site and just click on the new site button. You're allowed to have up to five sites in your account. When we click the new site button, it's time to start the design process. As such, one of the first decisions you're going to have to make, is the template or theme. Now, remember, you can easily change this as you work but it might mean that you start over a bit on the customization. However, the content will easily reflow as you try out the new theme. Now, let's begin. You see that I'm signed into Adobe Portfolio. And when I click that new button, it's prompting me to choose a theme to start. Here, what I want to do is take a look at the options. Now, there is the ability to make a full portfolio or a simple welcome page. We'll talk about welcome pages a little bit later. It's just basically a landing page that allows you to greet people, add a URL, think of it more as a temporary one page website. I'm going to switch back here to full portfolio. Now, as we scroll through these different layouts here, you see there's lots of different options. By default, the first one is a plain white page. But, let's go here and take a look at some of these others. Now, some of these layouts are optimized for different types of content. So as you scroll through, you get kind of an idea of what they look like. For example, Andreas is all about imagery and it works very nicely if you have photos to showcase. If you don't have a lot of pages, other themes are well-suited just for showing off small bits of content. You can see all the styles here and if you want to see what they look like, you could simply click on a theme and it will show you a preview site. This gives you a good idea of what it's like. This is a live example with demonstration content. You can also easily view it under different aspects of tablet versus smartphone here so you get a really good idea. While you're in this preview mode, you can switch between the different themes by just clicking the left or right arrow. And this gives you the option to scroll through different demonstration sites. Or, use the dropdown menu here to easily switch. Now, I really like this Marta theme. And you see as we scroll, it's got this cool responsive area at the top as well as persistent navigation that stays at the top. And that's quite useful, particularly, on a smaller device like a phone so the user can easily switch between things. So, it's pretty cool how this works. There are other options here for different ones. For example, let's take a look at Lina and you see how this is a very photo driven site with really large images that are all cropped to a consistent shape. This looks a lot like a catalog site or a graphic design one. Now, each theme has different advantages and you're going to see different types of navigation. So be sure to take a look at these live examples so you get a really good idea. I like the ones where the navigation tends to scroll with the site. So in this case, you see it rolls past, but other ones will keep it persistent so that as you scroll, the navigation is present. But this is really a personal choice. Let's take a look at another one here called Lucas. Now, I really like this one. Both because it has continuous navigation at the top and it's very clean and professional. Switching here, you see how easy it is to get an idea of how the content is going to work. Now, I'm going to build using the Lucas theme and I encourage you to use the same one just for purposes of following along. But if you do decide you want to build your own website and you find a different theme that you like, you can use that as well. When you find a theme that you're ready to use, just click the use this theme button. Now, you might see that certain content is going to be pre-populated. This is because you might have aspects that you've already uploaded to adobe.com or bhans or using Lightroom. In this case, don't worry about all these extra pages here. I'm going to show you how we can build this content from scratch. Now, what I'm going to do is clear these pages out. I don't want to see all of these here. So, I'm going to eliminate them from my design. To do this, I'll go over to the pages section. And what I can do is go in here and easily remove different pages. You also can delete an entire category but you need to keep one page set as the homepage. So it might be easier just to clear these out a little bit and you see how the design automatically adjusts. Now, we've kind of gotten back to the default layout. You see that it's a lot of blanks ready for content to be added. Now, don't worry if you delete things, you're not actually removing them from lightroom.com or bhans.com. You're just removing them from your portfolio website. We're going to populate all of these things in a moment. But as you see, there are full controls. Once you have a theme selected, you can start to put your own stamp on it by making some changes. Now, you are going to be limited on what you can change because some of the themes already have prebuilt color palettes but I'm going to show you how you can actually customize that a bit in just a moment as well as choose other options like custom fonts.