Disruptive Website Development
Alan Murdock
Brand Therapist. Connector. Insight sharer. It's time to get over your design, media, and communication hangups so your brand can thrive.
This month I started searching new tools for building web portfolios. The big player, and the first and last stop for many is Wordpress, but there are a number of new portfolio site providers that allow users to autoplay video backdrops, imbed video into a frame, write a slogan to stand as his or her guiding star.
Some of these providers are specifically targeting outplacement services, providing portfolio services to support elements of personal brand building, skill identification and marketing, and others are more broad. Others, the Wix's, Weebly's and Squarespaces of the world are providing fully hosted sites targeting a variety of demographics, from bloggers to online businesses and more.
Strikingly.com is a new service on the market providing templates for business, marketing, personal promotion, zines and more. It's basic template provides a vertical scroll with a banner or column with links to navigate. Rather than clicking from page to page, the website scrolls, animating content in to the frame of your screen.
The look is sophisticated and relies on web development tools to build the functionality, and the level of customization at the base package is very limited, however, a full package is available for the simple price of $192 per year - essentially $16 per month. The question for users is to what extent the model is scalable. If I start my store or business with one of the emerging service providers will it provide a customer service solution that will integrate with existing customer relationship management solutions? Can the tool be loaded to my server to be customized?
To offer these more complex solutions would mean new providers might lose the simplicity and elegance of their current offer, yet at the same time, the they may lose customers now that want a proven platform that will last over the long haul and that can scale as their offer and business grows.
I'm testing these offers to see what works and to report back. For now, check out my Strikingly.com site at https://alan-murdock.strikingly.com/.