Journo Portfolio

What Journo Portfolio is

Journo Portfolio is a portfolio website builder for writers, photographers, designers and other creative professionals. According to its FAQ, it started in 2012 as a tool for journalists to showcase their articles, which explains the name, and has since developed into a full website builder used by writers, photographers, fashion models, architects, designers, tradespeople and more. It is aimed at individuals who want a professional online presence without writing code or hiring a developer, and the FAQ says it has helped over 300,000 creatives build their portfolio. The pricing page describes its support staff as a UK-based team you can chat or email with.

What you build and how

The core of the product is an editor built around themes. The FAQ says the editor lets you choose from multiple themes, change all imagery and text, set theme colors and fonts, and control content, and the features page puts the number of distinct themes at 8. You are building a portfolio site or a small website for a person, not an app or a store.

The content types match the audiences the homepage lists. Journalists can collate all of their articles in one place, back up online articles and notify subscribers when a new piece is published. Copywriters get a site to send to clients with a contact form built in. Photographers build custom galleries for photos and videos and embed from external sources, artists get galleries, slideshows and image blocks, and authors can make pages about their books with links to external stores. The FAQ adds that the Pro and Unlimited plans allow you to upload and host video and audio files directly, and work can also come in as PDFs, links or embeds from SoundCloud, Vimeo or YouTube. Import by URL grabs an article's details from a link, automatic article import pulls in new articles when they are published on other websites or feeds, and article backups save online articles as PDFs or screenshots in case they go offline. A comment area lets readers respond to blog posts, with moderation and built-in spam prevention.

You do not have to build everything at once. The homepage suggests starting with a few of your best pieces and adding recent work, testimonials, your services and a contact page later. If you would rather not do the setup yourself, the homepage says the team will help you import your work, set up your site and customize it if you choose a Pro plan.

Publishing and privacy are covered in some detail. A free yourname.journoportfolio.com address comes with registration, and the Plus plan publishes the site at that address. A custom domain comes with Pro: you enter your domain, tick a box to confirm you own it and point it at the company's servers, or you can transfer the domain to Journo Portfolio. The homepage says the company takes care of the DNS settings, a security certificate and the renewal, and that the custom domain is included in the Pro plan at no extra cost, forever. HTTPS is standard, with no certificate to buy. Visibility has 4 settings according to the FAQ: public, password protected, accessible only by a secure link, or public with a suppressed search engine presence. Password protection can cover the whole site or a single page, and you can change the password and customize the password page image and text. The secure link grants full access to the locked site even on later visits.

For measurement, the features page lists an analytics section described as privacy-friendly performance tracking. On search, the examples page says the platform has the tools you need to rank well, and walks through general practices such as keywords, meta descriptions, titles, alt tags and internal linking.

Journo Portfolio also sits in the websites category in this directory. The reason is the editor itself: the same theme, text, color and font controls build a multi-section website for any professional who needs to show a collection of work or projects, not only a journalist's clippings.

Plans, pricing and support

The pricing page's headline is "Build your portfolio for free. Upgrade to publish." Free lets you build in the editor without a card, but the site is not published until you upgrade. Plus costs $7 a month billed annually or $9 monthly, and its listed feature is publishing your site at yourname.journoportfolio.com. Pro costs $10 a month billed annually or $12 monthly and adds a custom domain, 120 minutes of video or audio upload, article backups, password protection, automatic article import, a weekly subscriber email digest and advanced integrations: syncing subscribers to Mailchimp, adding custom HTML, CSS or third-party scripts, and integrations with SumoMe, Clicky and Hubspot. Unlimited costs $14 a month billed annually or $18 monthly and adds 240 minutes of video or audio, a multilingual site, invited collaborators who can edit your site, a built-in store and checkout for selling products and services, and priority support; the multilingual site and store are marked as beta. A footnote says audio counts at one tenth of video against the media limit, so 10 minutes of audio counts as 1 minute.

Annual billing gives the equivalent of 3 months free on Pro and 4.5 months free on Plus. A student can get 50% off the first year of any paid plan by emailing from an academic address, and a multi-site discount gives 50% off each subsequent subscription when you upgrade more than one portfolio site. Billing is offered in 29 currencies, and payments run through Stripe, PayPal or Paddle as merchant of record. Schools, colleges and universities can negotiate institutional pricing with student management and staff oversight; the case study names Republic Polytechnic in Singapore, which approached the company to provide Journo Portfolio Plus to up to 2,400 students.

The pricing page has a short "How we do business" section. It says the company has never raised prices for existing customers, that all taxes are included in its prices in every region, and that there are no fees for domain transfers or renewals. A full refund is available if you cancel within 14 days of subscribing, or within 7 days of a renewal payment. On ownership, the only rights you grant are those needed to provide the service plus consent to use screenshots of your portfolio or profile on its website and social media. On privacy, it says it does not use remarketing or share your data with advertisers, and that it extends EU GDPR rights to users globally. It also says it only uses servers in data centers powered entirely by renewable energy.

Testimonials on the site speak mainly to ease of use. Jennifer L. Grybowski, a writer and editor, writes: "It is super easy to use and looks extremely professional. I like the template aspect, but I also enjoy that there are lots of options within the template to customize." Sampada Chaudhari, a business and career transition coach, says she finds it "as easy to use as my social media accounts" and values not having to take backups or update plugins. Those are customer statements published by the company, not independent findings.

Who it suits and who it does not

Journo Portfolio fits a solo writer, photographer, copywriter or designer who needs a clean site to send to editors and clients, and wants the hosting, certificate and domain handled for them. The plan ladder is easy to read: a free plan to build in, $7 a month to publish, $10 a month for a custom domain and the extra integrations, and $14 a month for a store, collaborators and a multilingual site, all billed annually, with a 14-day refund window and a student discount lowering the risk of trying it. Someone with two or three separate portfolios, for different niches or clients, gets 50% off on the extra sites.

It is a weaker fit if you need a database-driven app or heavy automation. The named integrations are a small set, Mailchimp, SumoMe, Clicky and Hubspot, plus custom HTML, CSS or third-party scripts from Pro upward, and the store and multilingual features on Unlimited are still in beta. The free plan does not publish anything, so it works as a trial of the editor, not as a free host.