Adobe has launched a website building tool to design customized websites right from within the company’s Creative Cloud Suite.
Called Portfolio, Adobe’s latest offering makes it possible to build personalized websites in minutes, and competes with website building services such as Wix and Squarespace.
Adobe says Portfolio has been “designed to take the pain out of editing and creating your website.” A quick look at the tool shows it does have some cool features to showcase your work.
Features of Adobe Portfolio
Portfolio allows businesses to create a website that matches their style and needs. Apart from providing a sleek interface, Portfolio gives you a personalized URL, analytics tracking, password-protected pages, and Typekit fonts. What’s more, if you are a Behance user you will have your Portfolio projects automatically synced with your Behance profile. This way, your work will gain more exposure and reach more people.
You can also disable right-click to protect your images and use your own domain name.
Some prominent features include live editing that lets you see your changes in real-time and direct access that allows you to edit anything you can see on the interface. Moreover, Portfolio supports responsive design to ensure your site looks great across screen sizes and devices.
The Price is High
Adobe Portfolio has a lot in common with other website building services such as Wix and Squarespace, but where it falls short is its pricing. Consider this: for a Portfolio website with fonts from Typekit and access to Photoshop and Lightroom, Creative Cloud subscribers need to pay a monthly fee of $9.99. For the entire collection of Adobe creative apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, in addition to a Portfolio website, they have to shell out $49.99 per month.
Adobe is stressing though that Portfolio comes free with any Adobe Creative Cloud plan.
In contrast, Wix offers a free, never-expiring version and four paid plans in the range of $4.08 to $16.17 a month. For Squarespace, you get a 14-day risk-free trial to see if you like what you see. Paid packages start at $5 per month.
Quite clearly for the budget-conscious small businesses, Adobe Portfolio may not be the most feasible option. And Adobe seems to understand that. Not surprisingly, therefore, the software giant is highlighting the simplicity and sophistication of using Adobe Portfolio.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Adobe has tried to venture into website building. The company had introduced Muse, its website design and building tool, which received mixed reactions from designers.
Image: Adobe
Aira Bongco
I guess Adobe is now moving from the offline softwares that it serves and it is also now creating tools for websites. I think that they can also make some mean promotion tools if they tried.
Drew
The issue I find with all of these DIY site tools is that they own the site. You can’t download your Squarespace or Adobe site and host it elsewhere. I’ll always prefer something like WordPress that I can move to a new hosting platform if the price goes up or the service goes downhill. And Wix just sucks right out.
I have made a few websites using Muse and it was great. It was limited in that it had to work with Adobe’s CMS. If Muse allowed for export to WordPress, then it would have been the best thing on the market. I am sure this new system is also good… as long as you are already an Adobe Cloud user, and aren’t making a site that needs the better control of a good CMS