Dunked is a website builder for portfolios that has been around since very soon. One interesting fact is that the owner of this service has made himself popular by selling very good WordPress themes across the Internet. Whether his new service is as good as his WordPress themes, we are going to see now.
Starting out with Dunked
There is an absolutely free trial that doesn’t require you to enter billing details. It lasts for 10 days and you get your own subdomain on dunked.com. This is a great way for you to find out the features of the builder in action.
The basic building elements of the platform are called pages and projects. The names themselves are very self-explanatory. You either create pages where you put information (texts with a few images, forms, etc) or you create projects (support for lots of images as well as descriptions).
Creating a project is very easy. [highlight]You are sent to a drag and drop builder[/highlight] where you can easily arrange the information about your project easily. There are also lots of useful tips the first times that you are using the builder. This is great for newbies who are just trying out the builder.
Just like with content management systems, you can give your pages custom URLs. This is very good from both an SEO and an organizational point of view. This easily allows you to focus on the keywords that are important for your business, and it allows you to make your inner page structure better. Using custom urls for your pages and projects is also good if they have a long name. It’s much more practical if you use a shorter URL.
Themes and Designs
Even though we mentioned that the owner of the services has created not one or two good WordPress themes which have earned him his name, surprisingly, Dunked is weak on this side. There are only three themes at the moment. This is just too little for a website builder which pretends to be one of the best. However, we do have to point out that all of the themes look very good and really show a creative idea, as well as flawless execution.
The themes are also available for customization via code editing. You can take the theme and create your own copy of it with your customization parameters. The bad thing is that people go to website builders because they want to bypass the code editing process.
If you want to remove the footer tagline, for instance, you will have to learn a bit of CSS to do that. You will need to edit the code and add an extra line. We were really surprised that a website with such a good builder would have so many features which rely on code editing. After all, the idea of website builders is to create websites without knowing how to code.
However, there are several customization options which you can alter without having to touch code at all. For instance, the platform has integrated Google Fonts. You can easily change the font through a menu. However, we recommend that you searched for some font choosing tutorials before changing yours. It’s important that everything matches, especially when you are building a portfolio.
There are also great color changing tools that allow you to either choose the color, or write its code. On the right of the color picking tools you will see a live preview, without having to refresh. this easily allows you to make swift changes until you find the right color for your elements.
Portfolios often use password protected pages so that they can hide some of the content only for serious clients. There isn’t such a feature in Dunked, but there is something similar. There are three access parameters: visible, invisible, private. Visible means that everyone will be able to see the page and that it is accessible by search engines as well. Invisible makes it inaccessible to anyone but you. And private actually requires the people who visit the page to have a link to it. The page is not accessible by the search engines, which means that it won’t be visible there. So in other words, there will be no links to that page, and the only way of accessing it if you know that it exists. It’s not as elegant as password protected pages, but it’s still a way of hiding your work.
Mobile and Pages
Creating pages with the builder is very easy and a pleasant process. However, when you are creating a contact page, you will notice that you can’t create a contact form. This is a major setback because not all of the people have a mail client they use (which is the only alternative). However, this isn’t too much of a problem and it should be easily fixed with some of the next updates. One way of going around it is to get a custom contact form code that you can embed on your website.
As for mobile, Dunked is excellent. All of the designs are fully responsive and they show perfectly on different screen sizes. Just try and resize your browser when you visit the preview page. Even better – try and access it from a mobile device. It’s just amazing how much attention has been paid to the little details that make a mobile website really good.
In Conclusion
Dunked is a good builder, but there are some very basic things that it lacks. The creator of the platform is a very good developer and it’s a surprise that such simple mistakes have been allowed to go live. However, there are also lots of features that not many other website builders implement this well.
One downside is that, for some customizations, you need to know how to code. This is a setback for website builders, mainly because most of their clients are there to get away from exactly that.
But the thing is that the good sides of Dunked are excellent. The developers show that they pay detail to the things they build and improving the platform is just a matter of time.
