Sometimes, a general-purpose, do-it-all website builder is overkill. Especially if you know exactly what you want. Having lots of features has both upsides and downsides. Of course, having lots and lots of features is cool if you really are going to use them all. But too many features can also be overwhelming and can slow down your work progress.
If you want something simple, easy to navigate and showcase a variety of your work, Dunked could be your website builder solution. You can build your website to show your portfolio without the need to code a single line. As most creative professionals will tell you, designing for themselves is one of the hardest thing to do and it always takes the longest of time. Also, most of the time, creatives simply don’t have the time and maybe also not the web dev skills.
That’s exactly the spot where the founder of Dunked found himself. Orman Clark already made his name as a WordPress theme developer but he wanted a simpler solution for his online portfolios.
With Dunked, building and updating an online portfolio is a piece of cake. It’s aimed at those who don’t want to or don’t have the time to develop an online portfolio themselves. You’re probably going to be a lot faster launching your portfolio than choosing what work to showcase.
Dunked is one service provided by Make Lemonade. If you need more than just an online portfolio, you might find its other offerings helpful.
- Pros and cons of Dunked
- Who is Dunked for?
- How easy is Dunked to use?
- Dunked design and templates
- How to manage your ecommerce store in Dunked?
- Dunked integrations
- What marketing and SEO tools does Dunked have?
- Payment options
- Dunked security
- Dunked customer support
- Dunked pricing
- Is Dunked the right tool for you?
Pros and cons of Dunked
Dunked is a subscription-based service that you can access via your browser. You don’t need to install anything and all the tedious tech stuff such as maintenance is taken care of. It’s not an all-in-one all-purpose website builder but is meant to allow you to build online portfolios. This means you need to take care of your domain name, although hosting is included.
Pros
- Simple and fair pricing
- It’s so easy to use, it saves you time creating and maintaining your online portfolios
- Eye catching templates that can be tweaked to your heart’s content with HTML and CSS
Cons
- You can find Dunked a bit too simple and only focusing on letting you create and maintain portfolios
- You can’t extend its functionalities with plugins or integrations
Who is Dunked for?
Most of the time, people think only photographers, illustrators, or artists need a portfolio. But this is not the case. Of course, if you’re a creative type, say a designer, filmmaker, makeup artist, you’d want to have an online portfolio. But so do you, if you’re a web developer, WordPress (Drupal or other) theme developer, an agency, or even a writer.
Dunked is a no-code portfolio builder, but if you have web dev skills, you can go the extra mile and customise your portfolio through HTML and CSS.
How easy is Dunked to use?
The good thing is that you get to try all features for free during its 10 days test period, and you don’t need your credit card at hand when you sign up. It has a nice and easy signup process and it doesn’t fanny about asking endless questions.
As long as you don’t use your own custom domain, Dunked gives you a subdomain that you can choose. Know that as long as you’re still in the the free trial period, your site will only be visible to you when you’re logged in.
When you want to create a new portfolio in Dunked, you’re going to create a project. You can add additional information to a project such as what role you had or who the client was, and of course, add a description. Each project can be password-protected.
If you’re coming from WordPress, you can think of the projects as something similar to posts and use pages in Dunked just as you would in WordPress. Adding pages is also very easy.
Using Dunked to create portfolios is super simple. Its well-thought-out interface doesn’t leave you scratching your head and it saves a lot of time both in creating and updating your portfolios.
Dunked design and templates
Dunked lets you easily switch between templates since it saves the settings for each template. This means you can choose a template, customise it to reflect your brand and switch between them as you please.
It’s a walk in the park to customise a template and you even get to see the full CSS and HTML. If you’re not happy with your work, you can always reset the options, as well as reset HTML and CSS.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Dunked?
Dunked doesn’t believe in being a jack of all trades. Instead, it believes in simplicity. So, offering an online store is not within the scope.
If you want to sell your work online, you can try Lemon Squeezy, another service provided by Make Lemonade.
Dunked integrations
At the time of this review, Dunked does not offer a plugin, extension, or integration store, since it only focuses on giving you the easiest way to create and maintain online portfolios.
What marketing and SEO tools does Dunked have?
You can connect your Google Analytics with your Dunked account and so keep an eye on how many visitors are coming to your site. You can also connect your account with the popular social media such as Facebook but also Dribbble.
Payment options
If you want to also sell your work, you may want to test Lemon Squeeze, the online store service by Make Lemonade or you want to check out Jemi or Big Cartel. Feel free to tell me if you want a review on Lemon Squeeze.
Dunked security
Your site is secured with an SSL certificate, even in the trial period. Although it’s strange that Dunked’s own help centre isn’t secured with SSL.
Dunked customer support
Even with such an easy to use service, you can hit a wall. In such a case, you can browse the searchable knowledge base.
Dunked pricing
Dunked pricing is simple and transparent. Although it doesn’t have a free forever plan, it has a plan for agencies and one for professionals.
Is Dunked the right tool for you?
If you know exactly that you only need a tool to create portfolios, Dunked is super easy to use. It has beautiful and eye catching templates to boot. You can also password-protect portfolios if you want to share them with your clients.
However, if you want more than just to showcase your work or just have more configuration options, you may want to take a look at portfolio builders that also feature an online store such as Pixpa.
Original post here: Dunked review – simple portfolio builder
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