Is Your Personal Website A Dinosaur?
Posted on October 18th, 2010 in Small Business | 3 Comments »
Big News! We’re going to be unveiling a new feature next week: free porfolios for all of our wonderful designers. The rest of this post deals with the “why” and “how” but we wanted to make sure those of you too busy to read more than two sentences still knew.
We love young designers. We want to see talented young designers find work, we want to see talented young designers succeed, and we want to see talented young designers become part of the design community. So, when there’s something that makes it hard for designers to do these things, it’s sort of our job to help out.
Like how this cat is helping you remember dead memes.
Which brings us to the subject of personal websites. If you’re looking to do anything in design, you should have one. We could write an entire post on the “why” of that, but here’s a basic rundown: you need a place where you can display your work to the world, and it would also be nice if other people could check that work out and give you feedback and maybe even contact you if they like what they see.
The problem is that setting up a good, attractive website is hard. There are some popular sites, but these sites, unfortunately, use Flash. Flash, as you might have heard, doesn’t work on iPhones. Or iPads. So if you set your site up to display your portfolio using flash, a good chunk of the people who you tell to check it out are going to see a big ol’ blank page. Because of this, Flash is also a dying technology; and building your site around it would only be slightly more cutting-edge than loading your page with flying toaster gifs.
"Have you seen my Flash website? I linked it on my Friendster page"
The solution would be to set up your site using HTML, but–unless you’re both a good designer and a l33t programmer–this isn’t really practical. And even if you do have the programming skills, coding your own personal site would take a lot of time that you shouldn’t have to waste. Creative design talent should spend their time creating great designs, not coding.
Fortunately, you can trust us to handle all the boring nerd work. On Monday, October 25h (that’s a week from today) we will be launching a new feature on our website: free personal web pages. These pages will combine the aesthetic strengths of some of those Flash sites while still using HTML. In about two minutes, you’ll be able to do what would normally take a skilled programmer hours to accomplish: setting up an elegant portfolio site that lets you display your work, receive feedback, and connect with other designers without relying on an outdated technology.
Please feel free to share any criticisms, praise, hopes or fears about this roll-out in the comments. We love you all; keep being the creative geniuses we know you are!
Pingback: Personal Portfolios Are Here! | Tips for Student Designers and the Small Businesses Who Love Them: OrangeSlyce Life