7 Reasons You Need A Website, Not Just Social Profiles

This post is sponsored by Porkbun.com

An essential asset for any designer, especially if you freelance, is a beautiful website to host your digital portfolio. Rather than relying on social media platforms to share your work, creating your own website helps legitimize your professional online presence and win more clients. 

The best way to make your online portfolio stand out from the crowd is to host it on a .design domain name: it’s memorable, descriptive, and improves your branding and SEO. That’s why we’re offering all our readers their own FREE .design domain!

Read on to get your first year of .design for free at Porkbun.com and learn the most important reasons why you should definitely use .design for your professional portfolio. 

A Website Is More Professional Than Social Profiles

In business, first impressions matter. A fully-formed website that shows off all your design talents is more impressive than posts on a timeline.

Social media platforms that cater to designers, such as Behance and Dribbble, are great tools for networking. They should be part of your digital strategy, but by themselves, they’re not enough. To level up your professional brand as a designer, you need to have your own website. 

Think of all your social media accounts as a funnel to get people over to your .design website — which will look so slick as your link-in-bio! 

.design Improves Your Branding

Unlike social media platforms, launching your own website gives you total creative control over the look and feel of your brand. 

Instead of stacking content in a decontextualized timeline, a website allows you to finely tune the pacing of your visitors’ experience. This is why a website is better than social profiles at conveying why your way of doing things is special and unique! 

Furthermore, by utilizing an innovative domain name like .design, you’ll show your prospective clients that you’re on the leading edge of technology. 

Remember to include a call-to-action on your website to encourage people to get in touch – preferably via your .design email address! 

.design Associates You With the Global Design Community

Because .design is already being used by so many prominent design professionals and design-driven brands, including Spotify, AirBnB, Adobe, and Slack, a .design domain helps establish your authority and legitimacy in the world of design.

Anyone can sign up for a free social media account with minimal effort, but building a digital home for your work on a .design domain shows your commitment to your craft. 

SEO Will Help Your Website Attract Business

Having your own website means that you can use tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to make yourself more discoverable to possible clients. Advertising through Google will also help increase traffic to your website. Naturally, the internet is filled with information to help you learn about SEO and make the most of this important lead-generation tactic. 

Relying on Other Platforms Leaves You Vulnerable

Monday, October 4, 2021: the day Facebook stood still. The situation was particularly dire in countries like India and Brazil, where the Facebook-owned service WhatsApp has a near monopoly on both messaging and payment processing. Businesses large and small, and even government organizations, were suddenly cut off from their primary means of communication and commerce. 

In addition to possible outages, the constant iteration of tech platforms means that inevitably, they make changes to their products that hamper the way you are accustomed to doing business. Building your own website is simply the best way to make sure that your content will be presented consistently and reliably, because…

You Will Always Have Control Over Your Own Website. 

The global outage of Facebook’s products wasn’t the only recent example of the dangers of relying on any third-party platform to conduct your business. Remember the furor when OnlyFans said it would ban adult content on its platform? 

Although the unpopular proposal was ultimately abandoned, the news sent shockwaves through the community of OnlyFans’ creators, many of whom faced the prospect of their entire income stream vanishing overnight. 

The moral of the story: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Any platform can make unexpected changes that may negatively impact your ability to reach your customers. It’s always wise to diversify your assets, because if you rely only on one provider or resource, its absence could have drastic consequences. 

You Can Get Your First Year of .design Free From Porkbun! 

To help you give your brand a boost, trusted registrar Porkbun.com is offering a bundle of services with everything you need to launch (or relaunch) your professional website. In addition to your free .design domain name, you also get free WHOIS Privacy, free SSL Certificates, a free hosting trial, and a free email trial. If you build your website with content management platforms like WIX or Squarespace, you can easily connect your .design domain to your preferred service for free. Porkbun also offers completely free WordPress and Static Hosting options.

Register your FREE .design domain at Porkbun.com!