Cargo Collective is a collection of software solutions and tools designed for blog authoring, site portfolio building, and web publishing. Cargo, Cargo 2, and Persona are among the many solutions integrated into this one cohesive CMS platform.
Cargo, in itself, is a personal publishing solution designed to help content creators, artists, and creative professionals get access to highly effective tools and crucial networks to facilitate the exposure and dissemination of their creations across the online realm.
The platform is widely used by a wide range of very talented content creators, creative professionals, and artists as it allows them to showcase their creations to the online community using a reliable portfolio site builder.
Cargo Collective Benefits
To facilitate the specific needs of users, Cargo Collective provides members with freestanding websites robust enough to house all their content and a wide selection of highly customizable design templates.
The platform also offers a wide variety of easy to use, yet relatively complex, tools and applications to allow users to display their content the way they want to.
Cargo Collective also has a simple but unique user interface built entirely around the work and creation of the individual artist. With the clean and easy to navigate user interface, the user can go over their entire portfolio, design new content creations, and manage their publication in a single location with great ease and efficiency.
When you visit the Cargo Collective website, even without logging in, you will see a huge collection of regularly updated featured images and websites designed and created by its members in the Cargo gallery. On the left-hand side of the page, you will see the “Favorite Sites,” “Featured Artists,” and “Developers” tabs, which you can navigate through to check out other designs and creations.
Cargo Collective Features
Cargo Collective has completely configured its approach when it comes to site building, as evident in the features and tools they offer their members.
- Editing content – Adding and editing content has been transformed into a process similar to creating an email. Users can edit their content directly on the page. A drag-and-drop system is implemented to make it even easier to add images, text, columns, or any other component on the page.
- Design and layout – To design and layout your website, you simply have to click on the design tab to access the tools you need to start working on your website. The design tab is where you can establish the site’s global design and layout settings such as the alignment, color scheme, and typography.
- Image galleries – This is one of Cargo Collective’s most useful features. With just a few clicks, groups of a wide selection of images can be laid out in vastly different and often creative ways. Users can create an image gallery using a set of tools that are easy to understand and operate.
- Typography – Cargo Collective offers a significant collection of built-in, handpicked premium fonts. The platform has an active partnership with Type Network and other web font providers.
- Thumbnail index – The thumbnail index is used to visually present links to the various pages on a site. Each page on the user’s site will contain a thumbnail menu where they simply have to go over to choose the right thumbnail they want to represent that particular page. By default, the first image added to a page appears as the thumbnail.
- Linking – The linking functionality works hand in hand with the thumbnail index feature. Both functions help visitors navigate through your site more easily and efficiently. With the linking function, you can manually link one page to another with ease.
- E-commerce – The e-commerce feature—still in its beta phase as of the writing of this review—allows members and users to add a shopping functionality to their Cargo site in the easiest and most convenient way possible. The tool will help you from the organization of a product all the way to the packing and shipping process.
- Stacking – The stacking functionality is the most efficient way to make your Cargo site responsive and mobile-friendly. The stacking technique involves displaying different pages one on top of the other in a continuously scrolling vertical feed. Stacking can be limited to a single set or be done for an entire site. This is one of the most common methods used on websites designed for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
- Pinning – This is a feature that allows users to pin a specific page or content, making it a global element visible on every page of the site. The pinning function is often applied to brand logos navigation panels, banners, and so on. This makes it so those elements are always present and accessible on every page of the site.
- Backdrops – The Cargo Collective backdrop feature allows users to apply different types of backgrounds to a page. Backdrops will enable you to use any type of background, including a still image, a video, a Google map, a color gradient, or one of the many visual effects available in the Cargo gallery.
In addition to these features and tools, Cargo Collective also offers the Cargo 2—a new site building solution. Some of the most common uses for Cargo 2 include digital magazines, portfolio sites, startups, and design agencies.
Persona is another solution available from Cargo Collective. It is part of the Cargo set of web tools designed for any type of user handling smaller projects. Persona is a relatively smaller yet still robust site builder geared towards projects of a more modest magnitude, such as landing pages, release pages for albums, flyers, personal profiles, and so on.
Other notable features definitely benefiting users include SSL encryption, password protection, custom code, social sharing, contact form, duplication, domains, and more.
Cargo Collective Pricing
Cargo Collective is available for free. The free version comes with cloud hosting, a 100MB storage limit, the ability to edit CSS, five membership invites, up to 12 projects, and three pages. This option is ideal for users who may only be considering a few select portfolio pieces to upload.
For bigger and more sophisticated projects, there is a paid plan available. The paid plan costs $9 per month or $66 per year. The plan comes with unlimited projects and pages, advanced editing, unlimited bandwidth, and access to all templates available in the Cargo database.
Conclusion
Cargo Collective is an affordable and highly functional portfolio site builder. It comes with impressive features and capabilities, is user-friendly, and requires little to no coding or HTML knowledge. The web-based platform is ideal for small startups, freelance content creators and artists, creative professionals, design agencies, SMBs, designers, and for people who want to have a reliable and affordable platform to showcase their creations.