You surely have heard the following sentence already: Everyone needs a website. But not everyone has the time or skills to develop one. Cue in website builders.
However, not all website builders are suited for all the needs you could have. It could be that an all-purpose website builder is too complex or too expensive or offers far too many features for what you intend to do. Enter Carrd.
As a relatively new player in the website builder market, Carrd isn’t trying to be the next Wix or Weebly. Instead, its focus is on helping you create mobile-ready single-page sites that you can use for anything.
Carrd was launched in 2016 by the web developer and designer AJ who is well known for HTML5 UP and his collection of free HTML templates. It’s browser-based so you don’t need to worry about hosting.
Pros and cons of Carrd
Carrd makes it a breeze to create one-page websites while being the least demanding of your time, money, energy, or nerves as possible. One-pagers are often used as landing pages, online business cards, or presentations.
Pros
- No signup required until it’s time to publish your site
- Free forever plan with a very subtle and understated Carrd branding
- Probably the easiest to use one-page website builder around
- Very reasonable pricing
- All themes are mobile-ready
Cons
- Google Analytics is only available in the paid plans
- Adding a form is only possible in the two highest plans
- As a single-page service, Carrd is not offering many features beside website building
Who is Carrd for?
One-pagers are suitable for clean sites that are serving mainly as an information hub and nothing much else. One-pagers are often used in cases where you want your internet presence to serve as a front-page to build your audience or as a landing page to direct visitors to your other platforms including your social media, blog, or email list.
If you’re looking for a straightforward tool to build a professional-looking single-page website, you’ll find in Carrd an affordable and easy to use option.
How easy is Carrd to use?
Intriguingly, Carrd lets you jump right in and go through the entire process of building your one-pager without asking to first register. Only when you’re ready to publish your site does it ask for your email.
Right from the get-go, you select your template and you land in Carrd’s simple yet flexible editor. The editor feels like the most intuitive one-pager website builder I’ve encountered. The editor is clearly labelled and well-thought-out. There are no special lingo or terminology you wouldn’t understand or options hidden away in endless subcategories.
When you click on the elements such as images or text, the customisation panel slides into view from the right. As Carrd is a single-page website builder, you add what you need as sections to your page. You can rearrange the section by dragging them where you want. There are also undo and redo buttons. These will help give you peace of mind, knowing that you can reverse your actions.
Carrd design and themes
The Carrd themes are modern, minimalistic, stylish, and fully mobile-ready. Since Carrd is specialised in single-page websites, the themes also focus on landing pages, forms, portfolios, or online profiles.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Carrd?
In contrast to Strikingly, Carrd is strictly only information-hub-based. So, it doesn’t provide any shopping cart functionality. But all is not lost: you can still embed a Paypal button, Gumroad, Ecwid, or add a button that links to your online store hosted elsewhere if you’re a paying subscriber.
Carrd integrations
You’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription to be able to add widgets or embed custom code. This includes Google Analytics.
What marketing and SEO tools does Carrd have?
The strong point of Carrd is that it gives you a very intuitive website builder to create one-page sites. But at the same time, this can also be regarded as its weak point, as it only concentrates on that one task and so doesn’t offer many additional features.
SEO
You add meta tags for your one page when you publish your site. Just remember to upgrade your account to a paid subscription so that you can add the meta tags. The meta tags themselves can be varied, you just have to follow Carrd’s convention and enter each meta tag in name=content format (one pair per line). The name is the name of the meta tag and content is its content, see the example:
keywords=marketing, seo, blogging
Carrd gives you alt text for your images.
Blogging
Just as with ecommerce, Carrd doesn’t offer a blogging tool. Still, you can build a blog-like page with Carrd manually: You can create a section site and put links at the top who will jump to the relevant sections of text. This manual approach will not give you support for tags, comments, scheduling, or other advanced blogging options.
Payment options
Payment options can be added with the help of widgets and custom HTML embed codes. Carrd doesn’t offer built-in payment gateways.
Carrd security
All projects including the free ones built with Carrd are protected with an SSL certificate. In the highest plan that goes for a very reasonable $49 per year, you can download sites.
Carrd customer support
Even in the case of the most intuitive and user-friendly editor, it can happen that you need help. You’ll find a very well-organised documentation with step-by-step guides that should cover most questions. Should you want more support, you can use the contact form to ask your question.
Carrd pricing
Carrd pricing is very generous. Not only is there a forever free plan, but the paid plans are also very sensible. Note, in the free plan, you don’t have access to advanced options where you can embed custom codes or forms.
Is Carrd right for you?
If you’re planning to collect email addresses or feedback, Carrd gives you a wonderfully easy to use tool to create an attractive single-page website.
In the case where you want an online base – since you’re are pushing your content out via social media profiles or email lists, you’ll find Carrd will more than live up to your expectations. In both cases, it’s a strong tool without any glaring cons.
Just know that to be gain access to the most useful or desirable feature such as forms, widgets, or Google Analytics, you’d have to subscribe to the Pro plan at $19 per year or Pro Plus plan at $99 per year. For this more than sensible price, you’ll be getting awesome features that you won’t get with other website building services.
Original post here: Carrd review
No comments:
Post a Comment