I'm a long-time writer. Yesterday I easily fashioned a JournoPortfolio site to showcase a selection of my blog posts, the three books I've authored, and a few of the videos and photo essays that I've created.
Below is a screenshot of the top of the home page. Click on "Behold!" to, not surprisingly, behold my JournoPortfolio masterpiece.
JournoPortfolio is a unique Internet animal.
It's sort of a cross-fertilization between a blog and a web site. I've been blogging since 2003, and I've used several web site builders, so I understand how difficult it is to find the right balance between lots of features and ease of use.
My experience with JournoPortfolio is that it has masterfully found that balance -- with the proviso that if you're looking for a dedicated blogging service or full-featured web site builder, probably you should look elsewhere.
But JournoPortfolio excels at what it's home page bills it as:
Create a customisable writing portfolio without branding or ads. Writing portfolios for Bloggers, Authors, Journalists, Copywriters, Content Managers.
In case you're thinking, these guys can't spell customizable, you're probably (1) an American like me, and (2) unaware that JournoPortfolio is based in Great Britain. However, this makes zero difference to those who use JournoPortfolio, aside from the fact that questions sometimes get answered in accord with a distant time zone.
Regarding questions, I had quite a few at first. JournoPortfolio has an excellent help/messaging service that's just a click away from the Dashboard where a site is created and managed.
My initial interest in JournoPortfolio sprang from a need for a platform to host a multi-author online opinion site that a group of us here in Salem, Oregon wanted to create. So I was pushing some boundaries with JournoPortfolio, since it is geared toward showcasing the work of a single writer.
Still, I was convinced that JournoPortfolio would work for us, so long as we kept the site simple. However, other members of our group wanted a more complex web site. That argued for WordPress, or something similar, so I took over our trial JournoPortfolio site for my own use.
What impresses me the most about JournoPortfolio is its intuitive look and feel. Yes, it takes a bit of time to become familiar with how articles are uploaded and arranged on a site. But help topics are clearly written, and like I said, questions are answered promptly.
Someone did a marvelous job with JournoPortfolio. If you look around my site, you'll see that I have five pages, two of which feature videos and photo essays that were easy to share via "embed codes" from You Tube and Adobe Spark.
I really like how JournoPortfolio handles page design.
Basically, this is done by adding a content block of a particular type, as shown above. Then placement of the block can be adjusted by clicking on up or down arrows. For example, on my Video page, I'd add a video content block, then follow it with a text block where I described the video.
Give JournoPortfolio a try.
You can do this for free. I believe a multi-page site can be played around with for a week before it reverts to a free one-page site. Believe me, given the ease of using JournoPortfolio, a week is plenty of time to decide whether you want to spring for a Pro account.
That's $10 a month, or $90 for a year if you prepay for the 12 months. Which I did, because I was confident that as a writer/author/blogger, JournoPortfolio was perfect for me.
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