If you’re a creative professional you have to get the word out that people can work with you. As convenient as social media can be, it still makes sense to showcase your work on your own website. It just looks more authoritative and trustworthy for potential customers or employees.
By now, you got an almost infinite choice of website builders. But if you prioritise putting your work front and centre, you may not need all the bells and whistles that a general-purpose website builder offers. You may be a lot faster in building and maintaining your website with a specialised online portfolio builder. One that also values design and aesthetics. Meet Krop.
Krop is a specialised website builder specifically for creative professionals such as photographers, designers, illustrators, marketing experts, and developers. It goes beyond letting you build your portfolio site. It also connects you with employers and customers with its job board.
Krop describes itself as an industry job board and portfolio hosting website. It started out as a private newsletter for designers in 2000. In 2005 it evolved into what Krop is now. It prides itself that companies like Apple, Netflix, and Ogilvy advertise jobs.
Pros and cons of Krop
Krop is a cloud-based portfolio builder come job board for creative professionals. You can browse the jobs without an account. As for its web builder, it comes with the obligatory drag-and-drop editor so that no prior coding knowledge is needed. It also has a template gallery so that you’re not confronted with “the horror of a blank page”.
As a hosted solution, you pay a monthly subscription fee but you don’t need to install anything or worry about updates.
Pros
- Great for creatives who want a portfolio and browse jobs
- As a freelancer/employee you don’t need an account to browse jobs
- Job alerts
- Transparent and fair pricing where you don’t need to worry about running out of storage space
- Easy to use
Cons
- As a customer/employer you need the Search Creative plan to view candidate profiles
- Krop is designed more for job seekers, leaving employers with the basic features
- The job board focuses on a specific market, mainly visual creatives
- The jobs advertised are mainly located in the US
- No forever free plan to try out posting a job, viewing candidates, or for building a website but you can experience the website builder for free for 14 days
- No blogging function
- Customer support only via email
Who is Krop for?
If don’t want to rely on the bio-page of your social media, Krop allows you to launch and manage your portfolio site. Maintaining and curating your portfolio is as simple as putting files into folders. Even better is that you can browse its job board.
Krop also caters to the other side: employers and customers. You can post your jobs and view candidate profiles. For both, you’ll need a subscription.
How easy is Krop to use?
The first step in creating your account is to pick your template after which you key in your email and name but don’t need your credit card handy. After your first login, your taken to your dashboard. You’ll see a yellow notification telling you that the changes you made will be live momentarily but you can start working straightaway.
Krop has separated website design from content. For Krop, content is your work and you can upload it in a separate tab called Content. Upload all your content and create albums just by putting your files into folders.
In the tab Design, you get all the tools to design your portfolio. It’s here that you change your template, customise it, define custom design settings, or add custom HTML and CSS. In contrast to other portfolio builders, you can only customise the template. That is, you define what colours, fonts, etc in the template but you can change the design.
Krop design and templates
The templates are modern and designed for people who value design. They also put your work into the limelight.
No worries if you don’t like the template you chose when signing up. You can switch templates as many times as you like. Krop promises to retain your content and customisation if you want to revert back.
Although Krop offers a custom HTML editor, you can only edit the header, footer, and head section. You can also add custom CSS.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Krop?
With its unique feature of showing your portfolio to potential employers, for Krop, also having shopping cart features is out of scope.
What marketing and SEO tools does Krop have?
Job board
You can search for employers directly in your dashboard. On the other hand, employers can only view your full profile if they’ve subscribed to the Search Creative plan.
Custom URL
In your first subscription, Krop offers you a domain free of charge. If you already own a domain, you can connect your account, otherwise, you can use a Krop domain of the pattern https://ift.tt/cVnPKCB.
SEO & Social
You can toggle on the option for SEO and add Pinterest and Facebook integration. Instagram settings are placed in its own tab and with just a single click, Krop will automatically display your latest posts.
If you want to see how your website is faring, connect your account to Google Analytics. A separate tab lets you add your Google Analytics Property ID.
Payment options
Krop doesn’t offer ecommerce features including accepting payments.
Krop security
All sites created and hosted by Krop have an SSL certificate. You can set up private albums and password protect them to share with clients.
Krop customer support
Customer support is limited to emails only.
Krop pricing
You can try out Krop for free for 14 days and then subscribe to its one plan of $8.25 per month.
Is Krop the right tool for you?
Krop is a different beast than your regular website builder. Of course, it comes with the obligatory tools to let you build your site such as a templates gallery and a drag-and-drop editor. But it combines your portfolio with a job board to make it easy for you to find jobs.
If you’re an employer, most likely, you already got a website up and running. Krop could be interesting for you if you’re looking for candidates.
Even as an online portfolio builder, Krop doesn’t come with the full set of features. So, if you also want to monetise your work, you may be happier with something like Pixpa or Siter.
Original post here: Krop review
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