Another thing is the visibility you have with services like Dribbble or Behance that you cannot have with your homemade portfolio (unless you're a web star)

You also have designers who have a single page just to present themselves with links to hosted services (like dribbble, behance ...) This way you can have a beautiful personified home without all the backend stuffs.

I see, but you can't export your animation as a .gif to post over Dribbble for example.

Another solution (if you have knowledges in development) is to code the animation with CSS or JS and record it with Screenflow to make a .gif

Oh, I even didn't know the existence of Adobe Edge Animate, I'll try this out! Thanks (no export in .gif right?)

I see that no one is using Adobe Flash anymore :p

I agree with that but to do something "smoother" and more dynamic, it's not a good tool and After Effect is a bit huge for that too :/