One month after I applied for a beta account on Cargo Collective{1} and set it up with some of my favourite current work, I get an e-mail saying that they will go public and out of beta. This means that you still have to apply and some seriveces will cost money. Like custom CSS, custom URL and other customizations.
Current members will have 50% off on the prizes, which is really good. But, I don’t want to pay for my heartworker.com domain AND my portfolio space.
My ambition was to blog here and use my second domain joelhelin.com as a business portfolio when applying for internships and so on. But this made me look for other alternatives.
Conclusion
I want to use heartworker.com as both portfolio & blog{2} and link joelhelin.com directly to the portfolio part. I don’t want to pay more to have them seperated, when it acutally doesn’t do me any good.
So, my question is: how did you build your portfolio? Are you using plugins for WordPress or did you build you own CMS?
I created my portfolio site with WordPress as the CMS, and didn’t use a single plugin. Quite a few custom fields though!
I just went through the same process as you, setting up my Cargo Collective portfolio only to find out they were coming out of beta and charging soon. I’m not upset at all that they’re charging; that’s totally their own prerogative. However, I am fully capable of developing my own solution for free, so I will be looking into that shortly.
I’ll likely build it on WordPress, as Tumblr doesn’t allow me quite as much customization as I would need for a portfolio. For a blog, however, it is perfect.
Alex — Your portfolio is looking damn good, and I’m thinking about doing it the same way. But I’ll be using CSS and jQuery only.
Pat — I’m not angry at them at all, on the contrary, I like their business model and I wish them luck. I just don’t like paying for two services that is practically the same.
I agree on the blog part. Though I’m working on a Tumblr-tweak for WordPress that you might enjoy. Stay tuned. ;-)
A lot of people asked me why i use other platforms to showcase my work…”Stefan you can do better than this” Neah, fuck it…Cargo is an easy and professional way to keep my works together. The simplicity of it allow any visitor to understand your website. My works pop out and this is what matters for me – simple website with complex works. I always used free or payed platforms for my portfolio or blog, why bother?
Anyway I am waiting to see your result, you made me curious. Btw the blog look beautiful.
Cheers.
Some shameless self-promotion. We’re working on a portfolio tool called PortfolioDeck.com. It’s web-based, easy to upload and organize your work and gives you complete control over markup/style.
It’s currently in beta but works well, check out these two sites:
http://ahfolio.com
http://frankaschberg.com
Send me an email if you’re interested and I’ll send you an invite.