If you’re an artist, be it a photographer, designer, or in general a creative professional and you want to get your business off the ground, then you need to do some work to make this happen. I hear you ask, what kind of work? Well, MARKETING.
You have to show the world your work, your creativity. If you want to leave your mark, you need to let the world know about your work and yourself. And for that, you must have the proper tools: Your online portfolio.
Even if you’re a self-professed technophobe, creating your own website is not a big headache anymore. If you know you need a design-centric website builder that will show your work in the best possible light, you don’t need to go with an all-purpose website builder but can just look at portfolio website builders to make things easier.
Livebooks is a portfolio website builder for creative professionals. It comes with a drag-and-drop editor so that you don’t require tech skills. Still, you can customise each individual page and are not bound by a site-wide template. If you know HTML and CSS, you can customise at your heart’s content.
- Pros and cons of Livebooks
- Who is Livebooks for?
- How easy is Livebooks to use?
- Livebooks design and templates
- How to manage your ecommerce store in Livebooks?
- Livebooks integrations
- What marketing and SEO tools does Livebooks have?
- Payment options
- Livebooks security
- Livebooks customer support
- Livebooks pricing
- Is Livebooks the right tool for you?
Pros and cons of Livebooks
Following industry standards, Livebooks is a subscription-based service. You access via your browser and can create and manage your portfolio site. You can password protect individual pages or whole sections of your site so that you can give your customers access to your projects.
Pros
- Easy to use with a clean interface
- Since you can design each page you are not bound by a site-wide template
- No cookie-cutter look and feel
- You can add custom HTML and CSS
- You can try out Livebooks for 14 days without a credit card
- No image cap (although storage cap depending on your plan)
- Unlimited galleries
- Design and content are separated making content management easier
Cons
- Design and content separation might give you a little bit of headache when you’re starting or coming from another service
Who is Livebooks for?
Livebooks is focused on serving photographers, artists, designers, musicians, in short, creative professionals who need a portfolio site. It also works well if you’re running a creative agency. You can grant roles to your teammates so that they can work on their tasks such as making changes or publishing.
How easy is Livebooks to use?
As part of the signup process, you get to choose your website template. It’s always nice to see that you don’t need your wallet since Livebooks doesn’t require your credit card details at signup.
After your first login, you’re taken to your dashboard. You can find everything you need to get started, reports, and upgrades. You’ll find everything you need to do in the top navigation.
At signup, you chose a website template and it created the default pages
- Home
- Portfolios
- About
- Team
- Contact
You can always add more pages under the tab Content. Livebooks has pre-built pages such as Services, Events, or Testimonials. Should you not find what you need, then you can always use the generic page.
Livebooks has separated content management from design. This means any content you want to add, you have to do it in the Content tab for the page you want. But it also makes it easy for you to control where your content is shown as well as password protect it.
After adding the content, you can design your site. Livebooks gives you a tool to define design standards for your whole site but you can also customise each page separately.
Livebooks’ user interface is well organised and easy to use. It’s well-thought-out and a boon is that it has separated content from design. This might mean you’ll have a higher learning curve if you’re used to a standard website builder but it makes your content management a whole lot easier.
Livebooks design and templates
Livebooks templates are mobile-ready out of the box and included in the plans. The templates are designed to display your work in the best light.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Livebooks?
Livebooks itself doesn’t include a shopping cart. You can still sell your work online by embedding a service such as
Livebooks integrations
Besides social media integration with popular social networks such as Facebook and Pinterest, you can also integrate with analytics tools, maps, and more.
What marketing and SEO tools does Livebooks have?
Besides integrating with social media for easy sharing, Livebooks gives you tools for optimising for search engines and blogging.
SEO
As the name already suggests, a portfolio site is image-heavy. This means it is even more important to optimise your images for search. For one, Livebooks gives you image compression tools. Then, it also gives you a tool to add Alt-title and description to images.
For your pages, it’s easy to add title tags, descriptions, keywords so that your entire site will be properly indexed and easily searchable.
Blogging
Even if it’s easy to add a blog – it’s one of the pre-built pages you can choose, you can’t expect Livebooks to be as powerful as WordPress. The blogging tool makes it easy for you to regularly publish a blog post and you can even schedule your posts.
Payment options
If you want to sell your work, you need to embed a shopping cart. The payment gateways available depend on which shopping cart you choose to embed.
Livebooks security
Livebooks includes HTTPS for your site. If you want to share your work or proof sheets with your clients, you can create password-protected pages. You’ll also be happy to see that you can create backups of your design.
Livebooks customer support
On your dashboard, you’ll see Livebooks business hours (Mondays to Fridays 09:00 – 18:00 CT). You can mail or call the support team. There’s also a searchable knowledge base.
Livebooks pricing
Livebooks offers 3 plans that you can test for free for 14 days. Although there’s no image cap, depending on your plan, you still have a limit on how many pages, storage, or users you can have.
Is Livebooks the right tool for you?
If you’re mainly focused on showcasing your work Livebooks is a good place to start, especially if you have a lot of work to show and don’t want a cap on your images.
If you feel that you’d like more design freedom and customisability, you may want to look at Slides22. This service gives the flexibility of having different layouts on each page.
Original post here: Livebooks review – portfolio website builder
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