As my wonderful life partner, Casey McDonald, approached the culmination of her doctoral program at the University of Florida, she needed a way to showcase her research as well as her curriculum vitae. Without any easily-manageable systems that satisfy both needs, I set out to build her a custom WordPress theme that uses the Blog system for her case studies and a Pods module to manage her CV information.
Case Studies
This is the easy part. Part of being a doctoral student/candidate is aggregating a collection of published (and sometimes unpublished) research works to help demonstrate your expertise in your particular field. As Casey has no need for a general blog, the obvious solution to storing and displaying her case studies is to use the default WordPress Blog system to handle that load. The built-in comments system will work perfectly for any feedback she might receive from readers.
So, this is going to be the tricky part — Casey’s focus is Public Relations and Communications — so, her resumé HAS TO look good. Now, it’s easy to slap together a generic looking CV in Microsoft Word, but we need hers to stand out. That means custom formatting, attention to accent colors, and we’re really going to have to pay attention to spacing.
No Ordinary CV
Being aesthetically pleasing is great and all, but if users can’t access the information, or it’s sloppily organized, it will reflect poorly on you. So, the solution is to split the contents into two columns: basic overview items (skills, education, etc.) on the left and summary-type information (research papers, experience, etc.) on the right. Oh, yeah — this has to be responsive and mobile-friendly. So, basically, we are creating Pods modules for Education, Research Experience, Teaching Experience, Professional Experience, References, Honors/Awards, Skills, Research Design Experience, and Research Interests and then lumping all of those items in as repeater fields under a single Curriculum Vitae Pod.
Closing Thoughts
We’ve created an easy-to-use management system for displaying a CV that Casey can easily manage and is mobile friendly. Since the online version of Casey’s CV is technically a web page rather than a print-formatted document and we know that most users today use mobile devices, it’s important to keep everything responsive and mobile-friendly, ESPECIALLY her CV. In order to keep things easy to navigate when mobile, I’ve developed a quick navigation that will follow users down the page and hot-link to the specified sections. The template programming for the navigation includes conditional fallbacks in case any given section is empty and the respective navigation item will not be displayed. Bonus: we were able to match the PDF version of the CV to keep thematic/presentational consistency.
Project Features:
- Mobile-First Design / Responsive
- UI/UX Design
- Custom Curriculum Vitae Pod
- Responsive CV
- Downloadable CV
- Floating Quick Navigation for CV
- Case Studies
- Fixed floating CTA coded to change colors for user awareness
- CMS Integration