At some point in a designer's career they'll need to get their portfolio online in some manner.
There's a few options for this with several out of the box or community based sites such as Adobe portfolio or Instagram as a starting point, but at a certain point chances are that you'll need more functionality out of your portfolio. This could be in having your work taken to the next level by being presented in a more precise way, or having extra functionality such as selling your designs.
Throughout my career I've had some exposure to all of them and I'll give my thoughts on them below.
No actually! There are services online like Behance or Dribbble where you can upload your portfolio, which may well be enough to suit your needs with absolutely no learning curve. If you have bought into the Adobe ecosystem, you can also use adobe portfolio as an option to upload your work.
Generally speaking, if it's not well known and well used, beware. If you haven't heard of it before now chances are there is a reason behind it.
You likely aren't finding a hidden gem or going to be making big savings. Using a well known and widely used system means that there's a wealth of resources available, there's higher likeliness that system bugs have been ironed out and when you set stuck it'll be easy to google resources to help you out.
As a rule if it's anything you haven't heard of, with a name that sounds like "Website.ly", "Easy site" or "Nerd builder" or is some kind of in-built functionality of your hosting provider's service, exercise some skepticism and caution.
As the poster child entry point of the online ecosystem which I'd recommend avoiding, we have Wix. (and by extension it's "pro" version, Editor X) Wix has all of the issues emblematic of the more obscure site creation options.
Wix is a low code site builder which is mostly drag and drop, comes with domain registry options on sign up and is fairly easy to use which is great. It also has a decent range of templates ready to go making it one of the quickest ways to get a site on the net with some flexibility.
That's about as far as the good points go though. The first downside is that you are locked into their ecosystem. If you should ever outgrow Wix or decide it isn't for you, you'll need to start more or less from scratch and you are now beholden to any platform or pricing changes that they choose to make.
Secondly as a platform of their own, they are quite protective of their systems and severely limit your ability to add any kind of custom code - if it's not offered by Wix's templates, you're out of luck.
Thirdly a lot of the technology that Wix uses is quite outdated and has shown no real innovation for the better part of 10 years - which is a millennia on the internet. Things aren't fully responsive and can appear incorrectly if loading on any kind of screen resolution or window that Wix doesn't consider standard dimensions.
Finally, while Wix has some SEO tools they're fairly rudimentary compared to other options on the market and of course, you have no other options for other third party integrations so if you care about that deeply, you're likely to be served better elsewhere.
Weebly has all of the issues that Wix has but with less template variety, less robust drag and drop tools and lesser customisation options than Wix. The only perk is that it's free to use, so if you really want to get a page on the internet with no care what it looks like you could use it, but I'd argue as a designer it would look more professional to just have an Instagram page at that point.
Now we get into good options.
Squarespace offers all the things Wix does done better and as of time of publishing, for a lower price point.
It offers a plethora of templates and has a slew of plugins and integrations that allow you to do whatever you need it to do. If you want to build your site from a blank canvas it provides options to do that too - all with no need to learn any kind of code or back end functionality.
The only point where Squarespace starts to fall apart a little is it does suffer from the same issue of being locked into it if you use it and not being able to easily inject custom codes into it to do flashy things like custom animations.
It has a little bit of a learning curve to the logic of it's back end, but once you get a hang of it it is fairly intuitive.
If you're looking for the easiest, most robust way to get a functional, good looking site onto the internet with no knowledge of code, Squarespace is my recommendation.
Example websites (from Squarespace's website):
As the new-er kid on the block I'll admit that Webflow is the site builder I have the least experience with but I'd feel remiss to not mention it with it's rising popularity. Webflow allows for far greater customisation than any of the previously mentioned builders and has an expansive suite of animation tools and functions, plus can be used in a visual editor which has options for custom code integrations.
Competitively priced and with a well designed UI, some designers even make the claim that with using Webflow that they no longer need to work with developers to get impressive results. Webflow sites appear on the front page of web award sites like the Awwwards seemingly daily.
A thing to note is, that you'll likely need to have some understanding of HTML and CSS behaviour at least to get the best results out of it.
It seems best suited to smaller sites and folios, so I would give it my seal of approval for any whom would want to explore it as an option.
Owning your own website is always going to be better than relying on another company's ecosystem. It works out cheaper as you only need to shop around for whatever company will give you the best pricing - which due to the amount of competition tends to be quite a bit cheaper.
To compare, most of these site builders will charge you around $300 AUD a year, whereas hosting your own will cost more around $100 which depending on what hosting you get may also allow you to host your client's sites on their service as well. Additionally, by owning your own code, you can move it around freely as you want to.
"Over 43% of the internet is built on WordPress" source: W3
If you have a bit of knowledge of how to set up your own hosting and domain, having your own WordPress site is a good option, but really I mean any kind of content management system if you have the savvy on how to use them.
Some people view WordPress as outdated and while is has been around for a long time that means that it's very well trodden - it's very stable and has had literally hundreds of thousands of customizable themes, plugins and functions created for it. Whatever you want WordPress to do, there is a way for you to get it to do it and much learning material to help you get there. This is also true for systems like Craft or Wagtail but as these are newer platforms they can be a little less tested and with a smaller community to make resources for them.
The aforementioned technical knowledge on how to setup hosting aside, once your site is on the internet you don't need a huge amount of coding knowledge to get by. There's free themes, you can purchase more complex ones, or you can integrate site builders like Elementor or Bricks, or if you've got the chops you can integrate your own HTML and CSS to create a 100% unique site.
On that note, if you have enough skill in code obviously you can do whatever you want to do and a fully custom solution from scratch is the most premium solution, but also acknowledge that the time investment between learning and making all of your site from scratch can be immense.
