How I ended up on JournoPortfolio.com
Here’s the story of how I lost my website and created a new one again.
While going through the COVID-19 pandemic, temporarily losing work, then working around the clock to make up for the loss of hours AND a significant life change when my wife Jenn gave birth to our daughter Eliana in March, I completely forgot about my portfolio website: RonyCamille.com.
I am testing the waters in freelance journalism after taking a year of sabbatical. In addition, I am planning on attending the National Association of Black Journalists Virtual Convention later in August. Therefore, I wanted to make sure everything was “on point” should an opportunity present itself.
A quick URL check of my website led to “Error 404. Page not found.”
“Well, that’s bizarre,” I thought to myself.
So I head over to my hosting provider for the past two years. After a slight panic attack, a phone call to my hosting provider, and further investigation, I learned that my site hosting expired, and my WordPress site (which I didn’t back up offline) got purged.
Why? Well, I didn’t update my info when I switched financial institutions and neglected to update my hosting provider of the change. DOH! My fault and oversight on my part and well I’ll partly blame it on 2020 too.
This is the 2nd time in 15 years that I’ve lost and not be able to recover a website of mine.
Not all is lost though! I am slowly recovering some of my cached content. Additionally, this was the kick in the rear-end I needed to get my site fully refreshed and an updated better looking online portfolio.
Some features I wanted for this new digital home:
- clean and organized look on desktop and mobile-friendly.
- easy navigation.
- easy front and back end.
- blog option.
After quickly searching for an online portfolio, I came across JounoPortfolio.com and immediately got drawn to its user-friendly User Experience (UX design) and other features.
It’s straightforward to use. The site does most of the heavy lifting.
For instance, If you’re a content writer, you can take the URL from the website where your content is. It will scrape the article, excerpt, and metadata for you. You can edit the metadata once it has scraped the page and change a different image.
For you old-school print folks that have pieces from ages ago (not judging because I have articles from the early 2000’s only available in print), you even have the option to upload dot-pdfs.
There are various themes, designs, layouts, and royalty-free stock photos through Pexels to choose from and customize. I was able to get my site back up and running within a couple of hours. I’ve been tweaking it over the past week.
Now, can I deploy a custom WordPress site? Sure. But do I have the time? No. Who has time for that and the upkeep? Especially when I have this little cutie baby who needs attention all the time?
Isn’t she cute, right? Anyway, The website does that for you, and they handle all the updates and back-end stuff, so you can focus on showcasing your content.
Added features: You can make your site public or password protected and assign articles to different pages. If you’re a freelancer writing for various publications, this feature is for you.
While I am still a new user, I like the analytics it offers and SEO integration.
The only thing I am trying to figure out is the blog option. I may use Medium.com, Blogger, or Wordpress.org to post some of my personal thoughts from time to time.
Literally, everyone scrolling through this blog post looking for the recipe from a food blog page:
“Okay Rony that’s cool, so how much?”
Pricing:
JournoPortfolio pricing model has three tiers.
The Free Forever Plan:
Limits you to 10 articles and 1 page.
The Plus Plan:
This plan gets you unlimited articles & pages “yourname.journoportfolio.com” domain at $5/month. For first-time users, if you pay annually, you get two months free for a total of $50.00 for the first year, and I believe it goes to $60.00/year after that. If you own your domain name, you can do a redirect from the domain service provider.
The Pro Plan:
According to JournoPro pricing section of their website, it’s their “most popular plan.” With this plan, you get
- Unlimited Articles & Pages
- Custom yourname.com domain
- Automatic Article Import
- Article Backups
- Privacy Options
- Advanced Integrations
This is at $10.00/month. First-time users If you pay annually, you get three months free for a total of $90.00 for the first year, and it goes up to $120.00/year after that.
Oh for students out there. There’s special academic pricing for you too. It’s 50% off your first year of any paid plan. Just drop them an e-mail at o support@journoportfolio.com from your .edu email (to prove you’re a student) and they will send you a coupon code.
To note: the prices I mention are United States prices and will differ if you are in Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, or Australia. The site says that users in Brazil or India can also pay in their currencies too.
They also say that If you are self-employed, “your portfolio is a tax-deductible business expense.”
Finally, I think I am ready to point my domain over there from My LinkedIn page and make it the new home of RonyCamille.com.
Editor Note: This is an initial review of a product in hopes of getting a free plus account for a year. I upgraded to the pro plan shortly after publication.
