almost 7 years ago from Rafael Fernandes, Designer @ rafaelfe.com
I've hosted my personal site in a bunch of services. I used Dreamhost for Wordpress and custom sites. I used Cargo Collective, SquareSpace and now I'm in CarbonMade but I dislike the lack of customization in these theme-ready services. Where you guys host your folios? Do you develop your own code or use themed services? Why?
Been using Github pages for a while, but just recently switched to Surge
May I ask why you switched? I use Surge for everything and haven't used Github Pages. I assume it works more or less the same except Pages makes version control a bit simpler..?
Personally, I use Surge because it's closed source.
There are some other advantages in addition to version control, such as you can have GitHub generate your Jekyll site instead of you needing to do it.
+1 for Semplice. I'm using it for my own site and it's wonderful.
I think the biggest downside of Semplice is paying for the product and paying for the hosting. And there is no trial (obviously).
What $100? That's dirt cheap for a good, easy to maintain portfolio site. You could design and develop it yourself but for most designers that takes a long time (our site took 6 months to design and develop), or you could go with carbonmade or cargo and look like a cheap ass. Hell, get a tumblr.
I designed and coded my portfolio from scratch.
Firstly, because I like having the end-to-end control of everything down to the pixel. You can also keep your site's codebase really clean when you don't have a platform's worth of stuff you don't use loading every visit.
Secondly... this makes my portfolio itself a nice part of the portfolio. It shows that I can dev up a simple website.
Host w/ InMotion Hosting, code with Sublime and design with Adobe Fireworks/Illustrator and Affinity Designer.
Plug: www.alexrcamp.com
Current site - and by current I mean 4 years old - Cargo Collective. About 60/70% done with new one on Squarespace. After a long hiatis, will use Dribbble as a supplement where I keep fresh stuff.
I'm considering going back to SquareSpace. The last versions got a lot of customisation and CarbonMade's contact forms sends the messages into a terrible chat system.
So Squarespace is a good option then ?
It's meh. To be completely honest I have been a little frustrated with it. Working with type in it is a PITA depending on the template you base the site on. I think if I hadn't already spent so much time working on the assets for it, I would give Semplice some serious thought.
If you care about the little details, Squarespace will be infuriating and will force you to write a lot of custom CSS to make things look the way you want. If you don't care about every little thing, then Squarespace is a good way to get up and running quickly, although I find their templates somewhat uninspiring and not very performant.
I'll have SquareSpace a try since I'm not a frontend guy.
Semplice is really cool.
Webflow is a fantastic option to consider. It offers strong visual/interactive control + simple CMS. https://webflow.com/
I use GitHub Pages with Jekyll (although I compile it first, then deploy it to the gh-pages branch so that I can use plugins).
Here's my repo if you want to take a look at the workflow.
Recently built my site using HTML/CSS/JS with Siteleaf V1 as the CMS and opted to use their hosting service. So far its been great and would recommend using it or at least giving it a look.
GitHub pages, but I need to update mine.
I developed my own site for more control over performance and design. Recently jumped from Jekyll + GitHub Pages to Jekyll + DigitalOcean. Mainly due to GitHub's caching restrictions, but I also wanted HTTPS on my domain, along with more freedom to break stuff.
Currently using/relying on the new dribbble playbook (until they get sorted out how much they will charge etc).
I have mine hosted on MediaTemple. Custom site built using HTML/CSS/JS with a little PHP. georgebartz.com
Tried Semplice+DigitalOcean but gave up after a couple of weeks because DigitalOcean randomly crapped itself several times a day requiring a manual reboot. Now using Jekyll+Github Pages.
Also currently using Semplice and Digital Ocean and have been for the past ~two years (or however long Semplice has been out). I've had zero issues with either of them.
Semplice is great, no problems there. And I've used DigitalOcean for hosting various other projects throughout the years with no problems. For some (database) reason with this Wordpress install it just continuously fell to pieces. Spent more time trying to fix it, which totally defeated the purpose of why I bought Semplice in the first place :)
Currently hosting my personal site on github pages and it's a dream. Highly recommend if you know a little bit about git/github. I used my own design & code.
Although my own portfolio is still hosted on some cheap service and accessed through FTP (hehe), I started using GitLab a few weeks ago and they have a similar service as GitHub Pages, surprisingly enough called GitLab Pages.
I'm hosting one site on it now and it works great. The interface is much more organised and visually more designed than GitHub. GitLab also has free unlimited private repositories.
DigitalOcean for me. Should be GitHub pages fairly soon though.
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