There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:

1. Quite out of date
2. Not very compelling any more

The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I  started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do.

Hosting the own portfolio site

The good

• Once the visitor is on your site all eye-balls are on your projects.
• You can make a design you choose
• You are not limited on how many project, what media, how many pictures and text etc.
• Basically you are in control

The bad

• Hosting a site is not always cheap, not only the cost of the hosting, but also the cost in time to maintain it (yes you have to maintain it like your pc)
• You have to be fit to get better results (design wise speaking) than the established portfolio sites
• You have to advertise your site to get any visitors
• If you are not a web-programmer you must look for a developer in order to setup the site

Using a portfolio site

The good

• You don’t have to manage a website
• The design is optimized for portfolio presentation
• There are already many users on the site
• You can use them as a social network and find job opportunities

The bad

• You are one among many – The distinction between a Pro and a Student is difficult
• There is advertising which is competing with you for attention
• Integration with Twitter and other Social Media is only sometimes possible
• You are limited by the site on how to present your work

Conclusion

You can see that there are advantages and disadvantages as usual when you have to take a decision. It would be easy to say to do both and get out the most of it – but in the end your time should not just be consumed to do your portfolio.

I opted for a self-hosted portfolio site because I already maintain a few sites (like this one) – but will also have some key projects uploaded to the portfolio sites. To minimize the effort of maintaining multiple presences I write the content for my portfolio in a way to reuse it when I need to.

More on how I setup my portfolio site and how I structure it in a future blog post.

(image © Cameron Whitman on Istockphoto)