No thanks, I’ll do it myself...
Everywhere you look, there are ads promising free or virtually free website design and hosting. Why on earth would you pay for it? Here’s why:
Very few “free” sites will offer video streaming - it’s much too resource hungry and the files are too big. Okay, so why not use a third party, like YouTube or Vimeo? For a start they generally require that you assign copyright of whatever you're uploading to them - obviously not an option for media professionals. Secondly they stick their logo all over your media, and thirdly the quality of the stream is often quite poor - small viewing pane, for instance. To host video yourself - which is what I am offering - you need a specialist hosting service with a huge bandwidth allocation and serious amounts of webspace to store the material.
An employer wants to click on a clip and see good quality video instantaneously on whatever beaten up old work computer s/he's using. Media Showcase portfolios will deliver that experience, and that could well mean that the freelancer who owns the site will get the job ahead of others.
None of that is going to be offered by the build-your-own-site merchants. They're great if you want to show the holiday snaps off, or let Auntie May in Australia look at a couple of minutes of YouTube footage of the new baby. If what you need is a professional portfolio, then look elsewhere - in fact, look no further than here!
Everywhere you look, there are ads promising free or virtually free website design and hosting. Why on earth would you pay for it? Here’s why:
Very few “free” sites will offer video streaming - it’s much too resource hungry and the files are too big. Okay, so why not use a third party, like YouTube or Vimeo? For a start they generally require that you assign copyright of whatever you're uploading to them - obviously not an option for media professionals. Secondly they stick their logo all over your media, and thirdly the quality of the stream is often quite poor - small viewing pane, for instance. To host video yourself - which is what I am offering - you need a specialist hosting service with a huge bandwidth allocation and serious amounts of webspace to store the material.
An employer wants to click on a clip and see good quality video instantaneously on whatever beaten up old work computer s/he's using. Media Showcase portfolios will deliver that experience, and that could well mean that the freelancer who owns the site will get the job ahead of others.
None of that is going to be offered by the build-your-own-site merchants. They're great if you want to show the holiday snaps off, or let Auntie May in Australia look at a couple of minutes of YouTube footage of the new baby. If what you need is a professional portfolio, then look elsewhere - in fact, look no further than here!