As a change of pace from my last grumpy post…
I’m going to give a happy shoutout to the folks over at Carbonmade.com! 
I recently came across the free (you can upgrade and pay for more space and more features) and advertisement-free online portfolio website called Carbonmade at Carbonmade.com and decided to give the site and its portfolio application a test drive on a basic free account…
and what a test drive it’s been so far!
Just so everyone knows what’s going on at Carbonmade:
Carbonmade offers two levels of accounts – the Meh and the Whoo.
The Meh account is the basic free account that everyone signs up with and with it comes an allotment of 5 Projects (think of this as 5 folders/major categories that you can label however you want), and 35 images. You can also link your portfolio to a Google Analytics account to track how your portfolio is doing in terms of views and the like.
If you upgrade to their paid Whoo account, the numbers and features get bumped up to: 50 Projects, 500 images, and 10 videos. In addition, you can get your portfolio linked to your own domain name (you have to own the domain name yourself already, obviously) and you get priority customer support.
Now.
For myself, I already host the majority of my own online portfolio on my own domain name because I do front-end web development and web design stuff and it’s a good way to show off my skills 
and so I decided (so far) to stick with the Meh account and use it to showcase my absolute favorite and most recent pieces of work.
If you visit http://graffitimaster.carbonmade.com, you’ll see that I used my Projects to divvy up my work samples into 4 categories (yes, this means I have 1 Project left to use) and if you click on them you’ll see that each category houses a number of screenshots of related work samples.
Additionally, you might notice that when/if you try and right click on the images/screenshots in question, it doesn’t pull up the portfolio image.
Pretty nifty, huh?
Yeah, I thought so, too.
A couple of major reasons I’m digging Carbonmade:
- Nice, clean, and simple layout options for the portfolios
- Easy to use interface for portfolio, Project, and image arranging; image uploading; tagging/labeling; editing the About Me page; and editing pretty much anything else that can be edited
- The display method for the portfolio images
- Great customer/user support!
After all of my recent grumblings about customer support, experiencing a polite, super quick and to-the-point answer from the Carbonmade team – thanks again, Spencer! 
– is really what helped to clinch my positive opinion for both the Carbonmade application and website AND the people behind the project.
Carbonmade’s mission is to give people who need online portfolios a no-muss and no-fuss way to display samples of their work.
With their easy-to-use interface, clean and sleek portfolio layouts, neat method of displaying portfolio contents, tiered account levels to suit both the light and heavier users, and very satisfactory customer/user support, I think they have more than delivered.
For me, at least, some of the features I ran into while on my Carbonmade adventure came as a very wonderful surprise.
Maybe for you, they will, too.
Cheers to you, Carbonmade!
Thanks for making my day!
~ EMG /
