Table of Contents
- Adobe Portfolio Review – Reliable with Extensive Control
- Benefits of Adobe Portfolio
- Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Adobe Portfolio
- Design and Flexibility
- Ease of Use
- Domain and Hosting Solutions
- Pricing
- Focus on SEO
- What Do the Customers Think?
- Best Website Builder to Create a Portfolio Website
- Squarespace Review – User-Friendly and Affordable
- Benefits of Squarespace
- Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Squarespace
- Design and Flexibility
- Ease of Use
- Domain and Hosting Solutions
- Pricing
- Focus on SEO
- What Do the Customers Think?
- Best User-Friendly Website Builder
- Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace – Buyers’ Guide
- Design and Flexibility
- Ease of Use
- Domain and Hosting Solutions
- Pricing
- Focus on SEO
- Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace – Final Verdict
As an online course creator, it’s important to build your brand even if you don’t host your online course on your own website.
There are several website builders available in the market for you to take advantage of, two examples of which are Adobe Portfolio and Squarespace.
In this post, we’ll compare both these website builders in terms of user-friendliness, pricing, SEO-friendliness, and much more, to determine which one’s best for you.
| Features | Adobe Portfolio | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
| Design and Flexibility | 3 and a half stars | 4 and a half stars |
| Ease of Use | 4 stars | 4 stars |
| Domain and Hosting Solutions | 2 and a half stars | 4 stars |
| Pricing | 4 stars | 4 stars |
| Focus on SEO | 3 and a half stars | 4 stars |
Now that you’ve had a brief look at what both website builders have to offer, let’s look at them in detail:
Adobe Portfolio Review – Reliable with Extensive Control
Portfolio is Adobe’s software that caters to individuals who want to build a website to promote their brand.
As the name suggests, it was originally designed to help photographers and artists establish their portfolios online. Since then, it has been refined to become an all-purpose tool that all types of entrepreneurs can utilize to create their websites.
As mentioned earlier, you will need your own website as an online course creator regardless of whether or not you choose to host your online course on it or not. Adobe Portfolio can help you build an elegant website that you can use to direct traffic towards your online course(s).
While Adobe Portfolio is quite feature-packed, it does lack some essentials such as nuanced SEO settings, eCommerce tools, etc.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Fully integrated with all other tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud • Ready-to-use customizable templates • Affordable • Options for fine-tuning and greater control for veterans • Tons of benefits | • Lack of effective eCommerce and SEO tools |
Benefits of Adobe Portfolio
The first thing to acknowledge is the fact that Adobe Portfolio is free to use for all Creative Cloud subscribers. Thus, if you already have a Creative Cloud subscription, you can load up Adobe Portfolio right this second and get to work on it.
Adobe Portfolio comes with a library of ready-to-use templates. While you can simply select these templates and use them as-is, Portfolio allows you to change sections and pages according to your needs.
Furthermore, while you don’t need to have an understanding of HTML and CSS to create a portfolio website through Adobe Portfolio, it does give you the option to utilize them if you want.
Thus, in this way, Adobe Portfolio is able to cater to both beginners as well as veterans.
You’ll also have access to Adobe Stock which is a huge stock-image library from where you can get attractive pictures for your website. You also gain access to a wide library of elegant Adobe fonts.
Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Adobe Portfolio
Design and Flexibility
When you choose a website builder, it’s important that you go for one that allows you as much control over how your website looks and operates as possible.
While it’s true that Adobe Portfolio allows you to create dynamic galleries with elegant aesthetics, that may sometimes not be enough for you as an online course creator.
Remember that it’s essentially a portfolio builder so if you want to have more features on your website, there’s a chance Adobe Portfolio might not be able to accommodate you.
Ease of Use
Adobe Portfolio is definitely very user-friendly thanks to its intuitive interface and a vast library of ready-to-use templates.
You don’t need to have prior knowledge of HTML and CSS in order to create an attractive and effective website through Adobe Portfolio.
Domain and Hosting Solutions
Domain and hosting solutions are something that Portfolio does not include as part of its package.
When you create a site with this website builder, you will have to register a custom domain manually.
You’ll also have to choose and pay separately for a web hosting service.
Pricing
As mentioned earlier, Adobe Portfolio is free for you to use if you already have a Creative Cloud subscription.
If you don’t and would like to make use of the website builder, then you’ll have to pay $9.99 per month for the tool.
A subscription to the Creative Cloud costs $52.99 per month.
Focus on SEO
Adobe Portfolio does sport some basic SEO features such as analytics tools and options to edit titles and descriptions according to appropriate keywords.
However, if you want a website builder with advanced SEO settings, then Adobe Portfolio isn’t the one.
What Do the Customers Think?
Adobe has become a household name at this point with its tools being used by designers, artists, and entrepreneurs worldwide.
Adobe Portfolio is not one of their most popular tools but it’s most certainly used by a large number of their customers.
Regardless, people love how easy to use it is and how you can create an elegant portfolio site simply by choosing a ready-made template from their library.
Best Website Builder to Create a Portfolio Website
The best website builder to create a portfolio site is Adobe Portfolio. It can help you create an elegant site that you can use to showcase the salient features of your online courses. This could help you easily gather traffic and potential customers for your courses.
Squarespace Review – User-Friendly and Affordable
Square-space is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop website builder that has gained a lot of traction over the last few years.
If you frequent Youtube, it’s likely you may have seen an ad for Squarespace at least once.
If we were to compare Adobe Portfolio to Squarespace, the latter would come out on top in most aspects.
This is because Squarespace is not specifically designed to create portfolio websites. Instead, it has features that can help you create any type of website you want.
These can include:
- Blogs,
- Portfolios,
- Small business websites,
- Landing pages,
- eCommerce websites,
- Online stores
And much more.
Squarespace has an intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. This makes it very simple for you to create your own website even if you’ve never done it before.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Integrated domain and hosting solutions • Budget-friendly • Advanced SEO and eCommerce options • Huge library of customizable templates • Easy to use | • Does not offer any backup options |
Benefits of Squarespace
Squarespace has made a name for itself for many years since it launched back in 2014.
Their drag-and-drop website builder is something that is extremely easy to use which is why it’s a service that has attracted people from all types of fields to create their own website.
Its intuitive interface means that you don’t need to have any background in web development to create an effective and engaging website for your brand.
It’s fairly budget-friendly as well, as the personal plan will cost you only $12 per month.
As an online course creator, the features available in the personal plan are pretty much all you’ll need to create an effective website to market your online courses.
Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Squarespace
Design and Flexibility
When compared with Adobe Portfolio, Squarespace is a much more flexible website builder.
You can easily judge this by the fact that the latter is designed mainly to build a portfolio site whereas the latter has features to create all sorts of different sites.
This availability of features to cater to different website types means that Squarespace has much more refined tools for however you want your website to look and function.
Ease of Use
Squarespace’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) drag-and-drop editor is something that both novices, as well as veterans, will appreciate.
It’s extremely easy to use and you can see how your website will look as you make changes to it.
Furthermore, the wide variety of templates that you have access to are also completely customizable.
Thus, you can choose a template to start with and make adjustments to it as you need to create the perfect website for your online course brand.
Domain and Hosting Solutions
Unlike Portfolio, Squarespace is a complete solution to get your website up and running.
This means that you won’t have to manually register a custom domain and look for a web hosting service.
Even with the cheapest personal plan for Squarespace, you get a free custom domain that you can utilize to host your online course website.
Pricing
While Adobe Portfolio is $3 cheaper than Squarespace (Squarespace’s personal plan is $12 per month), when we take into account the number of features you get with the latter, it doesn’t really matter.
With increased flexibility, domain and web hosting solutions, higher control over template editing, advanced SEO features, and eCommerce tools, the value for money you get with Squarespace is much higher.
Focus on SEO
Squarespace has much more extensive features for SEO compared to Adobe Portfolio.
With a clear configuration with boxes for meta titles and descriptions and flawless social media integration, it’s definitely a great tool you can use to boost your online presence and widen your reach.
Furthermore, Squarespace also gives you the option to hide some pages of your website from indexing by search engines.
This is great because it allows you to experiment with new pages on your website without them affecting your SEO rank.
What Do the Customers Think?
Squarespace has made website building very easy for people with zero web development backgrounds.
People love the simple site-building platform thanks to its extensive tools that can be used to create whatever type of website they want.
Its focus on control of major SEO parameters, and extensive eCommerce tools are also something that users appreciate.
Some of the reviews we found on www.g2.com had this to say:
Best User-Friendly Website Builder
The best user-friendly website builder is Squarespace thanks to its intuitive style editor and dynamic gallery themes. You don’t need any coding skills to create a professional-looking website with this tool.
Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace – Buyers’ Guide
Choosing the perfect website builder for your online course business can definitely be confusing as there are many factors to keep in mind.
Some of these factors are:
Design and Flexibility
It’s important that whatever website builder you choose, it’s able to accommodate whatever type of website you want to build.
You may have certain needs and may want to customize your website in a certain way, so it’s important that you choose a tool that enables you to do so.
Avoid tools that only offer pre-made templates with limited options to customize them.
Ease of Use
We say this about pretty much every tool that will aid you with your online course creation journey: it has to be intuitive and simple to use.
You should be able to pick it up on the first day and understand the basics immediately.
This is because you don’t want to spend an extended period of time learning how to use the website builder. That is time that should go towards the refinement of course content.
Domain and Hosting Solutions
When you create a website, it’s only available on your local computer and not to anyone else.
In order to make it available to everyone via the internet, you have to use a web hosting service and register your custom domain.
Many website builders provide hosting solutions as part of their package and it’s usually a good idea to go for a tool that does.
This is because if it doesn’t offer hosting solutions as part of its package, you’ll need a web hosting service that’s good and fully compatible with your website builder. Plus, it will cost you extra money as you’ll pay for the separate web hosting service as well.
Pricing
As you won’t have a lot of money to work with at the start of your online course creation journey, we recommend you go for a tool that is as generously priced as possible.
When it comes to website builders, we recommend that you go for a service that costs below $15 per month.
Focus on SEO
The purpose of website creation is to gather traffic and potential customers.
If the website builder you choose does not have tools to optimize your website for search engines, it kind of defeats that main purpose.
Always opt for a site builder that has extensive SEO features and analytics tools that can help you optimize your website as much as possible.
Getting into the online course business can be daunting. Therefore, we have compiled a complete step-by-step guide for you to follow and make the best of your business.
Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace – Final Verdict
We’re at the end of our post for Adobe Portfolio vs Squarespace.
While both of them are great tools, we feel that Squarespace is definitely the better option for online course creators.
This is because Adobe Portfolio is mainly used to create a portfolio site. Hence, it’s not very flexible and you may not find its tools extensive enough for your needs.
On the other hand, Squarespace provides you with an easy-to-use editor, a vast library of customizable templates, an integrated domain and hosting solution, extensive SEO tools, and even eCommerce tools.
All of these features are just for $12 per month which we feel is an amazing deal.
Which builder did you use to create your website? Let us know in the comments below.