Lately, I’ve found myself in a bit of a conundrum: what domain to use for a new “portal” website that I am planning. It’s not going to be anything too elaborate, as it’s more or less going to be a self-hosted version of what people use Linktree for, using a content engine called Linkstack. The portal site would contain links to this site, the photo site, my various social media pages, and a contact form. I tested the Linkstack system in a testing environment back in February, and it works very well. The only reason why nothing has been rolled out to production yet is because other projects have taken precedence over this, and that’s understandable.
The endgame here is to have this portal site serve as a landing page for a future business card run. I would put a URL on the card along with a QR code, which would land people at that portal site, and from there, they could go to whichever property that they need to go. Running business cards is not unheard of for me, as I did it once before, back in March 2014. At that time, I was out of work (though I was working on laying the groundwork to begin my career in public transportation), and I was trying to make Schumin Web into more of a business than it was at the time in order to try to monetize the content in new ways. The way that I figured, no one was likely to license my various opinions about things, but the photographic content had potential for use in other contexts, and so that’s what I focused on. At the time, The Schumin Web was my only brand, and so that’s how I marketed it. The front of the business card had the logo on a cloud background:
Then the back of the business card contained my name, email address, and links to my Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages. One notable oversight was that the schuminweb.com URL did not also appear on the back of the card. When I designed these, I assumed that having it on the one side with the logo was sufficient, and that the URL there was prominent enough. I had more than one person not quite understand where the main URL was because they only looked over the one side of the card that had all of the text on it, and didn’t connect the URL that was on the front of the card with all of the text on the back. That was a major “oops”, but that was entirely on me. And by then, it was too late anyway, since the cards were printed, and I had 250 of them that I needed to use up. I gave a good bit of these out, but I feel like most of them are just sitting in a box near my desk, collecting dust.
Nowadays, I feel like I can’t give these out anymore. The front side of the card, containing the logo and such, is still perfectly fine, and my email address hasn’t changed. However, I don’t have Flickr anymore, and the Twitter has degraded into something of a cesspit that I would rather not be associated with anymore (if you’re looking for me on a microblogging platform, you can find me on Threads and Bluesky). All that said, it’s time to reprint, and I am open to suggestions on how to creatively recycle or upcycle or otherwise repurpose the old cards. Just remember that they’re printed on both sides, so I can’t use them for notecards and the like. The new cards will use the portal site specifically so that I only have to maintain one URL on printed material, and everything else can be adjusted on the fly by managing the portal site.
Meanwhile, this conundrum about what URL to use is a testament to how much my online presence has grown and evolved in the last decade. If I did this in 2014 or even as recently as 2019 or 2022, there would be no question about what I would use. At that time, it would have been a subdomain of schuminweb.com, because that’s what I did back then. I remember when I had a dedicated photo licensing site, and that was under a schuminweb.com domain name, and used The Schumin Web‘s regular logo. I don’t miss that old licensing site, because it was a lot of extra maintenance for not a whole lot of return. I do better now with a portfolio website and an inquiries form. But now, since July 2024, I operate on multiple domain names. I have this site on schuminweb.com, where it’s been for the last 25+ years, and then I have benschumin.com for the photo site. The separate domains are deliberate, as the two sites, while somewhat overlapping, serve different purposes, with Schumin Web‘s being largely about storytelling, while the portfolio site is a straight photo gallery. For a portal site directing people to multiple brandfs, I feel like I don’t want to favor one domain or the other by giving it the portal site, and thus take a more egalitarian approach to how I treat these two brands, i.e. neither is the “main” website and stands on equal footing with the other. Even more so when I have tossed around the idea of creating a new, modern “merch store” some day in the future, and that might contain elements from one or both of those brands. Like, for instance, if I’m selling photo prints, that would go on the benschumin.com side, while a lot of branded merch would go on the Schumin Web side. Lots to think about for future directions of things, and I don’t want to inadvertently paint my future self into a corner.
That said, with a larger and more diversified online presence, it makes me think that I should use a more neutral domain name for the portal site. Here are the domains that I’m thinking of:
- schum.in
- schumin.com
- schumin.name
I feel like they all have their merits. And for what it’s worth, I already own all of these domains, as well as a few others, so it’s not like these are pending acquisitions. So no one can just swoop in, buy these up, and throw a wrench into any plans involving these domains.
As far as schum.in goes, I’ve had that domain since 2012, and I used it for making shortlinks on Bitly in order to share on social media, back when you had to shorten URLs on the Twitter in order to make it fit under the 140-character limit for tweets. I feel like that kind of service has largely gone out of fashion now that the various microblogging platforms know how to handle URLs and not count them against your character limit, and I discontinued the use of that domain for Bitly links a long time ago (i.e. if you see an old schum.in link somewhere, rest assured that it doesn’t work anymore). So that’s an upside, in that is already an established name, though out of use, and thus would bring an old domain back into active use, and it’s also the shortest of the bunch. However, it has a .in suffix, which is the country code for India. I am not from India, and have no plans to even so much as visit India in the foreseeable future, so I don’t know if I want to necessarily associate myself with an Indian domain. Though that also begs the question: do people even pay any attention to that? Another downside of this domain is that there is a period in the middle of my last name, which I feel like would disrupt the flow of things, vs. not making the suffix part of the name, and people already have a hard enough time spelling “Schumin” as it is, without the need to break it up.
The other two, schumin.com and schumin.name, are more conventional. “Schumin” is the domain, and the suffix is separate. The use of .name or .com depends on how bold I feel when it’s time to roll it out. Technically, .name is the proper top-level domain for this sort of thing, but I feel like .name doesn’t have the same level of recognition as a .com domain. People understand what a .com name is, and so that’s a benefit. Another thing to consider is that these domains are solely my last name. While I am the only person named Ben Schumin, and thus I have a monopoly on that name (the spelling of my last name is quite uncommon), I am not the only person out here named Schumin. I can think of eleven other people living at this time who have the name of Schumin, with that specific spelling. Do I want to sit on schumin.com or schumin.name all by myself? Or should I be ben.schumin.com or ben.schumin.name in order to leave the possibility open to host similar portal sites for my various relatives should they so desire? One leaves the possibility open, while the other doesn’t. I mean, for all I know, my cousin Sophia might want to have a presence there some day. Who knows. So it’s something to consider, even if the possibility seems remote.
All of that said, there is time for me to ponder all of my various options, as the portal site is not a high priority project for me compared to other things. I place a much higher priority on catching up on my photo backlog, as photos are currently completely edited and ready to go up on my photo site through the end of October. All I have to do there is to sit down, upload the stuff, and then start hammering out the metadata, i.e. titles, descriptions, and keywords. Meanwhile, I am open to feedback on how I should position this little future portal site, though I am also wondering if I am greatly overthinking this, considering that it will largely be accessed via a QR code, and also printed on a business card. But once a run of business cards is done, you’re locked into it until it’s time to reprint them, whenever that may be.
So let me know what you think. Leave a comment below, or drop a note on any of the various social media platforms that I’m on.
[Update July 3, 2026: Portal site is now live at https://ben.schumin.name/]