I’ll be finishing my UX Design bootcamp in less than two months. One of the tasks I have for myself is building a portfolio website. There are so many to choose from! Well, I broke down the main portfolio website builders to help you decide.
For me, finding the ideal platform didn’t take too long. I don’t think it should take too long for you either. Because at the end of the day, you can change platforms if you need to. It may be cumbersome depending on the amount of stuff you have to transfer but it can be done.
Armed with a few case studies to put into the portfolio, I set out to find one that would fit my needs. The main things to consider when choosing a website builder platform for your portfolio is:
- Customizability: You need to be able to have the option to rearrange things how you want and choose from a wide variety of templates
- SEO Ready: People don’t often think about this (I don’t even think about this often…) but you need to think about SEO. You want people to be able to find your portfolio. Several website builders have fast loading times and easy input forms to make sure your SEO is good.
- Easy to Use: I don’t think anyone loves the idea of spending hours trying to troubleshoot and figure out how to do something. Having a portfolio website builder that is approachable and easy to navigate is necessary.
Squarespace
Everyone knows about Squarespace, right? I feel as though every content creating online influencer has a sponsorship with them, haha. It’s for good reason. Squarespace is actually good! My experience with Squarespace is minimal. I used them for a two week free trial to test out the service years ago. It was a good experience but I did end up going with another website builder.
There is a large selection of website templates. A lot of them have a minimal style, which many people have grown to prefer. The main thing many people (myself included) don’t like about Squarespace is it’s lack of advanced customization. When you visit a website hosted on Squarespace, you can almost immediately tell it’s hosted on Squarespace. That isn’t always a bad thing. After all, your work is supposed to be the one talking. However, I’ve noticed as people have grown brands, they tend to move off Squarespace to have more customization.
Overall, for someone just needing one site, a portfolio to showcase their work, Squarespace is a top choice. Squarespace combines so many great things together. Good customer support, a large selection of beautiful website templates, ecommerce tools, SEO tools, and more all inside the platform. The pricing isn’t too bad.
PRICING (personal plan):
$19/mo (month to month)
$14/mo (annual plan $168/year)
UX Folio
Obviously, by the name, this website builder is geared toward UX Designers. I used UX Folio to build my very first portfolio site with my first case study. If you want to build a portfolio relatively quickly, UX Folio is the solution. They make it very simple to put together a portfolio. They have prompts to help you figure out what to write for each section of your case studies. There are suggestions on different sections you can add.
So yeah, UX Folio is very user friendly and and a simple solution to quickly bring a portfolio together. You can even have a free site with one case study (UX Folio branding is on it). The premium tier lets you get rid of the UX Folio branding and add as many case studies as you want.
PRICING:
- Free (one case study & UX Folio branding on site)
- Premium
- $15/mo (month to month)
- $9/mo (annual plan $108/year)
WebFlow
I keep seeing Webflow’s name pop up often. It’s exploded in growth and continues to do so. For good reason. There are people who prefer using Webflow more than WordPress. Which is crazy to hear since WordPress has been around for a while and used by so many websites. Webflow is made for designers who want to create fully-functioning websites without having to hand off high fidelity mockups to a web developer. They can build the site themselves. This is so fascinating to me!
This post is about building a portfolio website, but Webflow really seems to be a website platform you could grow with. I see job postings for UX Designers that sometimes mention the company desiring a candidate that has Webflow knowledge. While it does have a lot of customization ability…that comes with a learning curve. Which may not be ideal when you want to quickly put together a portfolio for job applications. Many fellow UX Design students in my program’s slack channel have been having a hard time learning the in’s and out’s of Webflow while building their portfolio on it.
Pricing for site plan (basic):
- $15/mo (month to month)
- $12/mo (paid annual at $144/year)
Adobe Portfolio
Adobe Portfolio is a website builder offered as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service. It doesn’t have any additional cost on it’s own, includes website hosting, and you can have an unlimited number of website pages. There is a variety of beautiful templates with great layouts and minimal design. There is a blog packed with many useful tips for building your portfolio.
It was very tempting to use Adobe Portfolio since it’s included for free with Adobe Creative Cloud. Ultimately, I chose not to because I cancelled my All-Apps subscription a few months ago. At $54.99/mo + tax, it got to feeling too expensive. Maybe I would feel differently if I had a company reimbursing me for the plan, but I don’t, it was just on me to pay the monthly cost.
I ended up getting Affinity’s collection of one-time purchase products including Affinity Photo (Photoshop alternative), Affinity Designer (Illustrator alternative) and Affinity Publisher (InDesign Alternative). They were only $50 each for a one-time purchase with future updates included.
If you still foresee yourself having an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the foreseeable future, Adobe Portfolio is really good. Many have said it’s easy to use and straightforward to set up a site with.
WordPress (self-hosted)
WordPress is not a website builder, it’s a content management system (CMS). However, I included it in the list because it’s the platform I decided to go with. I have 8+ years experience working with WordPress sites so it felt to be the natural choice. It won’t be for many people since self-hosted WordPress has a learning curve to it. I started using it back in a college class when I had to do a class project centered around building a site hosted on WordPress.
WordPress is for people who want a customization flexibility and don’t mind fiddling with technical stuff and dealing with a learning curve. It’s a powerful tool. 30% of the world’s websites use WordPress. And when I talk about WordPress, I’m talking about wordpress.org (NOT wordpress.com).
If you want to use WordPress, you first have to find a website hosting platform. BlueHost and SiteGround are two popular ones. I’ve used both and they are both good. I started out with BlueHost, then switched to SiteGround because everyone was raving about it, then switched back to BlueHost because SiteGround kept raising their prices. It went from $13.50/mo for grow big plan to $24.99/mo in a four year time frame!
Bluehost’s charges broke down to $5.95/mo for introductory pricing and after my three years are up it goes to $11.99/mo for ‘plus’ package. Not too bad and definitely better than SiteGround. After purchasing BlueHost’s ‘plus’ website hosting package, I went into my dashboard and clicked the WordPress installer to install self-hosted WordPress on my domain (colinjashby.com). After that was done, I used Elementor, a website builder, that is installed as a plugin inside WordPress.
The pricing for everything was:
- $5.95/mo (paid for three years upfront at $214.20)
- $4.08/mo (paid annual at $49/year)
Elementor does have a bit of a learning curve, but not too much. There are a few frustrating things I haven’t fully figured out when it comes to formatting with Elementor but I’m learning more everyday. I’m happy to use it to build this website.
Anyways, as a mentioned before, you can change platforms if you decide later on you want to use a different one. Every platform is going to require some learning. Above all, the main thing is having a place to show your work. All of the platforms listed are able to do that.
Good luck! Have a good time designing your digital home!
