Carrd cannot be called a powerful tool for creating absolutely everything, but it will be enough for a personal project or a small business.
A complex project is not always necessary. Sometimes you need to make a simple business card, a portfolio, a convenient form for data collection or an aggregator with links to all social networks. In such situations, a great solution is Carrd.co – a zerocoding one-page website builder.
Carrd allows you to build a good-looking website in minutes, which will look good on any device. Even more: it gives you the opportunity to do it for free.
The basis of the builder is good old Vanilla JS. It is complemented by the jQuery framework, which is needed to manage browser events and DOM manipulations. Skel was used to organize cross-browser and adaptability, and jquery.touch was used to drag and drop elements in the body of the builder. By the way, the last two tools are also projects of the author Carrd, who uses the nickname ajlkn.
These tools helped to create an intuitive visual interface with dozens of templates. It’s enough to place the necessary elements in the working window – and the site will build itself. Without code and unnecessary headaches.
What is good and what is bad about Carrd?
The author of the project had the task of making the builder fast, adaptive, user-friendly and with the lowest possible entry threshold. Literally: so that anyone could create a page on its basis. And he coped with this task.
What are the benefits:
- Ease of use.
- This entails the impossibility of creating really complex projects, as in the case of low-code platform FlutterFlow, but you do not need to understand the code;
- High speed of creation. According to the developer, you can make your own site in 5 minutes. Of course, if you understand how it should look like – or if you take a template as a basis;
- Free of charge. Carrd has a paid version that expands functionality, but you can work with it without financial investment, creating business card sites, portfolios, lendings and other projects;
- No need for registration. In order to start working, registration is not necessary, it will be needed only for uploading the finished project to the server;
- Adaptability. Mobile formats are very important, especially now that everyone has a smartphone. The project on Carrd will automatically be adapted to both desktop and phone.
The main disadvantage of the designer is mentioned above: you can’t build a large marketplace on it, nor can you build a project with a really unique and inimitable design. For this there are other tools.
Website builders are not limited to the Carrd service: there are much more complex options that allow you to build social networks, full-fledged online stores, and huge multi-page resources.
What can Carrd do?
First of all, Carrd is a business card website builder. It is designed to publish information about the user on the pages designed with its help. This is a name, photo, brief description, icons-links to other resources.
But the matter is not limited to this. The design of the platform with the ability to put photos and videos on the background, choose fonts and location of elements, connect forms and simulate multipage would not allow Carrd to stay forever within the framework of business card sites.
That’s why it’s used to make:
- Landing pages for products and services – fast, adaptive, with instant scroll up;
- Forms for getting feedback from customers, collecting data, and even selling products;
- Portfolios with image gallery, examples of work and the ability to contact the owner;
- One-page sites with mock multi-page sites, where clicking on a link pops up a new page.
What about paid subscriptions?
Carrd offers not only free use, but also a Pro subscription. It is connected for a week at no cost if desired, just to see if the user needs it.
What the paid subscription gives you:
- custom site names;
- more templates;
- no “Made with Carrd” inscription;
- full-featured forms with the ability to build your own;
- Stripe, PayPal, Gumroad, Typeform, etc. widgets;
- installation of slideshows and videos as background;
- connection to Google Analytics.
With Pro, you can build and run more sites – for example, the standard plan gives you 10 sites, while the “plus” plan gives you 25 or more.
Carrd has a total of three paid plans:
- Pro Lite costs $9 per year,
- Pro Standard – $19 per year,
- Pro Plus – $49 per year.
Carrd cannot be called a powerful tool for creating absolutely everything, but it will be enough for a personal project or a small business. For freelancers, the portfolio function is a real salvation that requires neither code knowledge nor a lot of time.