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:

Quite out of date
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.