Wow! I am so excited to see that Behance’s much anticipated ProSite launched today. No announcement, nothing. I guess that’s what they call a soft launch! But I am way too excited not to write about it. No way!
I seriously think that Scott Belsky and his team have created a tool that will change the world of online portfolios! Dear students and young designers, there is no more excuse not to have a site up. With ProSite it will be a matter of minutes to be up and you will no knowledge of coding whatsoever, yet you’ll be able to fully customize it. I just played around with the interface and am blown away. (Dear WordPress, I love you, but could you maybe have a peek at what ProSite has created?) The ProSite user interface is a work of beauty and is incredibly intuitive. Building a portfolio has been easier.
But ProSite goes way beyond being a simple portfolio site. ProSite is built upon the Behance Network which ties in to several other platforms such as LinkedIn, the Served Sites and others. This means with a click of a button you can decide which platforms will get notified with the new content. Don’t underestimate the power of millions of creative enthusiasts that visit Behance sites every month to watch and follow the latest and greatest work by creative professionals across industries. (I visit their Served Sites all the time.)
Many reasons to love ProSite. Check out some of these sample portfolios. People sure push the limits of customization. (This one here, by Felixng is my favorite.)
I am thrilled that ProSite is finally live. Congrats Scott, Mattias and team!
(No, Behance did not pay me for this post, I am just seriously excited about the product they’ve built. Consider me a fan!)
i am a big fan of behance too, but honestly after taking the tour of ProSite it really looks like they borrowed far too heavily from Cargocollective.com here. // sad face.
May 3rd, 2011 / 9:52 pm
hmmm, got to disagree w/ you hudson on that one. tons of website builders out there. i love how this one doesn’t have any css editing or coding (which is what i don’t like doing!).
May 3rd, 2011 / 10:07 pm
Please tell me it’s easier to upload files and update pages than with the previous behance site!! I’ve left my portfolio to wither, outdated, because the interface is so convoluted. I’d love to see a screencast proving they’ve made some changes. Frankly, I’m used to a WordPress-like situation where I can thrown down some HTML code rather than clicking buttons (especially for images).
Am I asking too much? Just two cents.
May 3rd, 2011 / 11:38 pm
ohhh that is fantastic. Always nice to find out other platforms. I have used squarepace a lot, but this one looks like another nice option.
May 3rd, 2011 / 11:58 pm
i’ll check it out more, but at $11 a month, you lost me. This needs to be priced very competitively.
if all you need is a simple site you can get cheap hosting at godaddy for as low as $3 a month (or go in with some friends on a deluxe and split it, it can be so cheap) add in wordpress (free) a nice template (free). Pretty much with zero coding. Even so who doesn’t know someone who could help them code.
Like i said i will check it out but it would have to be pretty amazing for me to pay $11 month for. I know to some it may seem like small change but for a lot of people it could be a lot cheaper.
Also hoping they improved how to add a project etc (or does that still run off of the regular behance site? I would think to myself, hey I have 10 minutes, i’ll throw a new project up, half an hour to an hour later i am still trying to fill out their fields and setting permissions.
May 4th, 2011 / 12:00 am
$11 a month to avoid dealing with technical issues is really not that much unless you run a completely crap business.
Let’s not forget that people who deal with the web professionally are not the only designers in the world, and that typical non-web designers need products they can use themselves to represent their work.
May 4th, 2011 / 12:44 am
If you are a professional, or claim to be one, you should put the effort in making a decent site. Even if it’s just to display your portfolio. Coding a basic site is really not that hard and if you want something more elaborate: contact a web designer. Those guys need to eat too you know. (And no, I am not a web designer)
It’s like all those tv shows about cooking. Suddenly everyone claims to be a master chef, because they know how to follow a recipe all the way through.
Not a fan.
May 4th, 2011 / 4:56 am
Cargocollective created a tool that changed the world of online portfolios in 2009… I did not know of alternatives. Behance is copying the original idea that could kill Cargo. Very sad.
May 4th, 2011 / 9:40 am
I tried out ProSite for the last couple weeks, and honestly, it made me go and set up a Cargo site instead. As someone who knows HTML and CSS, customizing my ProSite took way longer and was much more difficult. Overall, the whole thing felt a little clunky to me. I recognize that I’m probably not their target audience, though.
May 4th, 2011 / 11:41 am
thanks for the mention, tina!
May 4th, 2011 / 1:29 pm
Wow, it’s a total rip-off of Cargo! Why are you promoting this site so much? It’s seriously the same exact thing as Cargo, but 2 years later.
May 4th, 2011 / 3:21 pm
Came here to ask how this was different from Cargo Collective, and seeing I’m not alone.
May 4th, 2011 / 4:27 pm
Hey Cargoers, that’s a totally different platform. ProSite tied to Behance profile and not to a standalone set of images like Cargo does. Cargo does not own a huge 20mln visits creative network it’s just a cool website tool right? ;)
Anything else is just an obvious holy war.
May 4th, 2011 / 5:04 pm
Uh, Cargo came after Behance’s project CMS (2007), and Indexhibit’s templates/system (like 200 AD). ;-) Two obvious points a Behance member mentioned to me. I’d suggest folks look beyond ProSite’s tour and actually try to see how it’s tools work, sans coding or CSS (phew).
May 4th, 2011 / 6:11 pm
I LOVE Cargo for my portfolio site, BUT prosite’s integration with Behance (and LInkedin) is a total game changer. I dunno..getting used to Cargo’s interface and ease of use, BUT i really love the idea of that integration. I don’t want to switch….but i’m thinking about it.
$11/month ($9 for cargo) to not have to deal with the technical frustrations, optimization etc etc is WORTH THE CASH! Why does every designer have to be a ninja developer?
May 4th, 2011 / 6:31 pm
if design is all about improving upon what’s been done before, well, prosite seems to be improving upon what’s been done before.
quite frankly, i think progress in this whole “online portfolio” space serves all of us.
May 4th, 2011 / 6:39 pm
Prosite looks great, but they aren’t the first to introduce an easy to use interface 4ormat has been around for over a year and its 4.99$ per month.
http://4ormat.com
May 5th, 2011 / 9:02 am
Hi all – just wanted to chime in with a few thoughts from our team at Behance (and Tina – thank you for the post!).
We built ProSite in response to a few serious needs we observed among creative professionals, namely (1) the need for a very professional and customizable website that DOESN’T require any HTML/CSS knowledge, and (2) a more productive way to manage an online presence that is now about much more than an isolated online portfolio on your own domain.
There was no other service online that sufficiently addressed these needs.
To address need #1, we developed a way to control thousands of little design details that would normally require programming knowledge using simple sliders and a new drag-and-drop interface that we are very excited about.
To address need #2, we created ProSite to stay in sync with projects published on Behance.net – which also powers creative portfolio display on LinkedIn, AdWeek, AIGA, galleries like TypographyServed.com, and soon many more sites around the web. It was tricky, but we devised ways to help users vary styles and project design on their ProSites while adhering to the Behance project-publishing/cms tool that has been evolving since 2006.
We want ProSite to boost productivity, the likelihood of portfolios staying updated, and ensure that your work gets more exposure (and serves to generate more traffic to your portfolio).
We also think that spending tons of time maintaining a personal portfolio that is only seen by people you know and is not “connected” to the rest of the web is inefficient.
We’ve been testing ProSite for months with a few thousand early Behance members. The feedback has been very encouraging and we hope you’ll take a look under the hood! http://prosite.com
As I read through the comments, I recognize that those with advanced programming knowledge may prefer to create their own site or play with the CSS through other alternatives like Cargo Collective. And yes, there are certainly cheaper and more “templated” options out there. No doubt, ProSite is intended for an audience that wants something different.
May 7th, 2011 / 4:54 pm
I’ve been a Behance member since 2007 when they first launched. Scott Belsky, CEO of Behance, thank you for always making improvements to the site. It has come a LONG way. I really love your book, Making Ideas Happen. The book is brilliant and has definitely helped me as a designer to take leadership roles such as founding the first Type Directors Club student group at the Pratt Institute where I attend grad school.
Behance is also accepted on Linked-in and you can display your work on Linked-in from Behance. Which is great!
May 8th, 2011 / 5:33 pm
For over a year I have seen requests from Cargo users in the forums for them to allow interface-driven customisation and to add social media and blog integration. They ignored this and instead spent their time on developing the CargoCulture… So it’s hard so have sympathy for them after not listening their users needs. I will be switching to ProSite this month.
Aug 7th, 2011 / 10:22 pm
I’ve been testing prosite to the last couple weeks. It’s awesome… In theory. The big problem I’m having is the time it takes to create a project. There are just too many fields, tags, titles, descriptions, permissions, promotions etc. to fill out on the behance site. I hate that everything has to be created in behance first. And the prosite build interface is really convoluted. There seems to be a bunch of places to turn On/Off text descriptions. Can’t get it to do what i want, which is really frustrating. I think I’m going to stick with cargo for now. I really wanted to love prosite.
Apr 27th, 2012 / 11:40 am