"Don't be in such a hurry" by Toni V

Tonight I got an email from a friend asking if I could help his brother out. The brother in question had a request from a publishing company to see his website, as they might want him to illustrate a book. Awesome, right? Yeah, except the brother doesn’t have a website.

Now it being a Friday night and me being generally booked about a month in advance, I decided to give him some tips on how to build himself a half-decent site ASAP. So without further ado I’ll expand upon those tips here…

A few resources for free/cheap starter sites you could set up yourself

For the most part these are services I’ve come across but haven’t used. If you have, please consider leaving comments about your experience with them.

• the behance network – you could set up a profile like this illustrator’s http://www.behance.net/corcoise (lovely work, isn’t it? mmm)
• carbonmade.com is specifically for creative portfolios like this one. I like that it gives you a clean layout to display your work. However every time I view one of these I’m frustrated by the poor link from a project view back to the main page of a person’s portfolio. You have to hunt too much for that little tiny arrow top left next to the person’s name. (Yeah, I bet you missed it too, huh?) Why not make the person’s name a link to their main page? After all, one of the first rules of web design is don’t make me think. But hey, it’s free unless you want to upgrade to their $12/month plan.
• squarespace.com – I didn’t realize the fabulous Gwen Bell‘s site runs on SquareSpace until I looked at their examples. So that goes to show you that it’s not necessarily cookie-cutter stuff because Gwen had a designer customize hers to be unique. They offer sites you can edit yourself starting at $8/month.
• WordPress.com – If you’ll want to blog, and especially if blogging will be a big part of your strategy longer term, then definitely consider starting at wordpress.com. It’s not nearly as customizable as when you run WordPress on your own webhost (“self-hosted”, the kind I like to build), but it’s a great start. You can have one going in a few minutes, choose from multiple themes, and customize those to some degree. You can also buy cheap upgrades for a bit more customization etc. The best part is that when you decide to blog elsewhere, you can easily export all your content in a format that can be imported into your new blog. Portability of your content is really important if you spend a lot of time on it.
• Flickr – If I were a photographer or illustrator I’d also consider just setting up an account at Flickr. You can set up “sets” and so on, like Martin Whitmore does. Flickr is free with an upgrade for something like $25/yr.

Any of those options would get you through a start-up nicely, then you could consider if you need something different once you get your feet wet. Of course if you decide you need a customized WordPress site, I’d love for you to get in touch.

If you’re going to rely on any of these services which offer a paid version, I encourage you to upgrade if only because a service you’re paying for is more likely to be viable long-term. The last thing you want to do is build up a site and have it go “poof” because they couldn’t afford to keep the lights on anymore, you know?

Before you run out & tell everyone about your new site, go get your .com

So most of these services will give you a web address (a “domain” or an “URL”) that’s longer and more complicated than the ideal (e.g. johnsmith.wordpress.com or behance.net/johnsmith). That kind of sucks. Worse, if you publicize an URL like that but want to move later you’ve shot yourself in the foot.

Step number one should be to register a domain for yourself, e.g. yourname.com. If you do that at netfirms.ca or netfirms.com for about $10/yr, then, for no extra charge you can set it to point to the portfolio you’ve made elsewhere. That way you can advertise your .com and not be tied to any of those services long term. When people click on a link to yourname.com they will end up at yourname.wordpress.com or whatever. (There’s lots of places you can buy domain names, but those are ones I think are pretty user friendly with minimum upsell junk and good customer service. GoDaddy for instance makes you jump through tons of NO-THANK-YOU-ALREADY hoops to get your domain name, super-tacky graphics, and is reviled by web masters everywhere for being more difficult to work with than it needs to be. Just sayin’ )

I’m sure there are other options out there, but these are the ones that came to mind for me. Know of others? Any questions? Let’s hear it in the comments.