Goal
Give you the option of owning yourname.com, and make sure you understand what you are actually buying.
Audience
Anyone who wants a professional address on their résumé. Completely optional.
Process
Buy the name at a registrar. Add two kinds of records. Tell your host about it. Wait. Done.
You do not need to do this
Let me say that clearly, because the rest of this page is going to sound like a sales pitch and it is not one. You can graduate with an excellent portfolio and never spend a dollar. Behance is free. Google Sites is free. Adobe Portfolio is free while you are here.
This page is here because it is an option, it is cheap, and it is less hard than people think. Not because you owe it to anyone.
What you are actually buying
Your domain is portable. Your host is not.
That single sentence is the whole reason a domain is worth $12.
Everything else on this list is somewhere you are staying. Adobe Portfolio goes offline if you stop paying. Squarespace goes offline if you stop paying. Platforms get bought, redesigned, shut down, or priced out of reach.
yourname.com is yours as long as you renew it. You can point it at a free site today and re-point it in five years at something completely different. Every business card you ever handed out still works. Every résumé you ever sent still works. The link never dies, no matter how many times you move.
You are not buying a website. You are buying the right to move without losing your address.
Which platforms let you do this?
- Behance: No. Never has. Always
behance.net/yourname. This is the one exception, and it is fine, because Behance is a profile, not a site. - Adobe Portfolio: Yes. But remember the site itself goes offline when Creative Cloud lapses.
- Google Sites: Yes, free. The course default, because the hosting is also free.
- Squarespace / Wix: Yes, on paid plans.
- ArtStation: Pro (paid) only.
- WordPress.com: Paid plans only.
How to do it
- Pick your name.
firstnamelastname.comis the safe, professional, boring, correct answer. Keep it short enough to say out loud over the phone. Avoid hyphens and numbers. Skip clever spellings, because you will be spelling this to recruiters for years. - Choose
.comunless you have a real reason not to. It is cheap (~$12/yr) and it is what people trust and type by default. Fancy endings like.designor.aioften cost five to ten times more and can read as gimmicky in a job search. - Buy it at a registrar. Cloudflare and Namecheap are both reputable and reasonably priced. Cloudflare sells at cost, which is about as cheap as it gets. Watch for the renewal price, a $1 first-year deal that renews at $40 is not a deal.
- Turn on auto-renew and domain privacy. Auto-renew so you never lose it to a forgotten email. Privacy so your home address is not in a public database. Most registrars include privacy free now.
- Go to your host and find its domain settings. Adobe Portfolio has a Domain Name tab. Google Sites has Custom domains in its settings. Squarespace and Wix each have a domains panel.
- Your host will hand you DNS records. Usually some A records (a few numeric addresses) and one CNAME (a name). You do not need to know what these mean. You are copying values from one screen to another. That is all this step is.
- Paste those records into your registrar’s DNS panel. Copy exactly. This is the part people fear, and it is the part that is just typing.
- Go back to your host and add your domain in its settings so it knows to expect you.
- Turn on HTTPS (sometimes called SSL, or “enforce HTTPS”). It is usually a checkbox and it is free. Without it, browsers put a scary Not Secure warning on your portfolio.
- Wait. It can take anywhere from a few minutes to 72 hours to start working. This is normal, and it is the number one reason people panic and start breaking things. Set it up, walk away, check tomorrow.
The single most common mistake: setting it up, seeing it not work five minutes later, and then changing everything. DNS is slow. Give it a full day before you touch anything. Most “broken” domains were working fine and got broken by an impatient owner.
What it costs, really
- The domain: about $12/year. Forever. That is the only unavoidable cost.
- The hosting: $0 if you use Google Sites. Otherwise whatever that platform charges.
- Privacy and HTTPS: $0 at any reputable registrar. If someone charges you for these, use a different registrar.
So the cheapest fully professional setup on this page is: a domain (~$12/yr) pointed at a Google Site on your personal Google account. That is roughly a dollar a month, forever, and nobody can take it away or raise the price on you.
Resources
- Cloudflare Registrar · sells domains at cost, no markup
- Namecheap · friendlier interface, slightly more expensive
- Adobe Portfolio: custom domain setup
- Google Sites: use a custom domain
Platforms change their plans and their menus constantly. If a step here does not match what you see on screen, tell me and I will fix the page.