I had the pleasure of having coffee with Dylan Fareed this morning, mastermind (design and coding power) behind Arlosites.com.
Arlo/Artists is a fantastic way to build a great-looking portfolio site. You can pick from nicely designed themes, custom domains and a truly powerful templating system for full control. Arlo/Artists lets you have unlimited portfolios and a clear interface to let you focus on organizing and promoting your work.
Considering he designed and coded the entire system himself and that they are coming out with a gallery version in the coming weeks, which is even more complex, I am convinced Dylan never sleeps. Ever.
Thanks for the link & the coffee, Tina!
The secret is that I outsource the sleeping to a team in Eastern Europe so I can focus on work.
Aug 31st, 2009 / 12:47 pm
Nice but too expensive compared to some excellent tools like cargocollective or indexhibit!
Aug 31st, 2009 / 1:33 pm
@Plato75 Value is fairly subjective, but I think we’ve priced Arlo/Artists affordably. You can sign up for a free two-week trial, but staying on thereafter requires an annual flat-fee of 100 dollars (US) – that works out to a little over $8/month (about the cost of simple hosting most anywhere).
We thought a lot about pricing for the app and figured we’d need to do it this way for a number of reasons – not the least of which being that we need to make sure we can be here and in business to continue to provide customers new themes, improvements and reliable service.
Arlo/Artists gives you unlimited image/sound/video uploads, an easy-to-use CMS, a growing collection of pre-designed themes, automated backups, complete access to your front-end template if you want to build the front end from scratch, timely support and a lot more. IMO, folks are getting a lot in return for the price (and never seeing adverts anywhere on the front end or backend).
Indexhibit and Cargo are both great services (and there are numerous other solutions out there as well), but neither are actually free. Cargo hasn’t posted what they will start charging in the future (anywhere that I could find) and Indexhibit (hosted) will run 200 Euros a year apparently: http://www.indexhibit.org/hosting/ Even the free download requires you to pay for hosting somewhere.
At the end of the day, if you want to have your own portfolio website and you choose to run it through Arlo/Artists or another service (rather than managing hosting and your content from scratch on your own), you’ll have to pay something for it and I am pretty sure we are offering quite a bit of value for what we are charging. Really, I think the question is which service better suits the way you work.
That all being said – and sorry, Tina, for such a long comment – we are always working feedback from customers back into the products so if you, Plato75 or anybody, have some suggestions about better ways to stay afloat, I’d be stoked to hear them. Thanks!
Aug 31st, 2009 / 2:45 pm
I understand. I forgot the hosting solution. Nice work Dylan.
Aug 31st, 2009 / 6:43 pm
I thought this site was great too…until I signed up. Apparently, when they say you have 2 free weeks, they get your card info and charge you anyway. This has caused me some HUGE inconvenience so buyer beware, this company is not worth it at all.
Sep 2nd, 2009 / 11:13 am
Cancel that last comment, their customer service is AMAZING and fixed the problem almost immediately. After using their site for a day I have to say it is really impressive and I will continue to use Arlo as my portfolio site.
Sep 2nd, 2009 / 11:44 am
Just started using Arlo for my photography portfolio, ran into some snags early in and Dylan was there on the chat line to help solve them.
I have an immediate sense these guys want to do it right and are wililng to go the extra mile to make clients pleased with the service. T
Sep 8th, 2009 / 8:49 pm
Thanks everybody for your comments about Arlo/Artists and our customer support! We aim to please and it’s much appreciated to hear good things back.
Sep 9th, 2009 / 5:06 pm
I can’t wait for the gallery release ! Very usefull in my case !
Sep 9th, 2009 / 5:32 pm
I had a terrible customer service experience with Arlo. In their terms of use, they promise customer support and even extended support for extra payment (which I was ready to make), but in reality – they simply open a “ticket” with a customer question or request and never get back to you. It was apparent that these two (or a few more) individuals never made this business their priority, and then they abruptly dropped their services and folded. I am now looking for another way to build an online portfolio and actually have customer support, and hopefully my experience will be better this time. In retrospect, I am sorry I wasted my time on Arlo.
Sep 5th, 2011 / 11:25 pm
I also paid for a membership for Arlosites, built a portfolio, and am not allowed for the access to the site that I paid for. If anyone has log-in information I would appreciate it.
Nov 4th, 2011 / 4:07 am