Cardel Is Live: Your Site, Your Audience, and Your Work in One Place

Cardel is live, finally.

For a long time now, I have been building the platform I went looking for and could not find. A place where a writer, an artist, or a professional can put their work online, gather the people who care about it, and keep all of it on a site that belongs to them. Not a profile on someone else's network. Not five subscriptions stitched together with exports and copy and paste.

Cardel provides the forge. You bring the craft.

This post is the full tour. Every feature below is shipped today, and I have linked to real sites running on it so you can see the output before you decide anything.

Start with a question, not a dashboard

A new Cardel site does not open to an empty control panel. It opens to a question: what is this site called, and what URL should people type to find it?

That is Guided Mode. It runs on your live site, so when it asks about your Home hero, your Home page is on screen beside the question. It branches around your answers, so if you are not selling anything, the payments step never appears. You come out the other side with a finished site.

I wrote about why we built it that way in Build a Site of Your Own in Guided Mode. If you only read one other thing, read that one.

When Guided Mode finishes, about a dozen of those same questions carry over into Editor Mode, the panel you can use for ongoing edits to your site. If you need to make a change on your About page a month later, the question is in the same dock, in the same shape. The thing that taught you the product is the thing you keep using to make updates.

See it running before you build anything

Here are three places to look:

• The full demo walkthrough is a single video that follows a site from empty to published.

• Forest Artist is a complete demo site: a painter with an Art Gallery, a Consultations page that takes real bookings and payment, a newsletter, and a blog. Every page there was built with the tools described below. (Note that the demo site is fictional, and not intended to represent real people or human-made art work.)

• orinhutchings.com is my own site, where I am building my own community around my journey of writing my debut fantasy novel.
  

Your site, your look

Your selected theme is not a template you fight. It is a color scheme and a font pairing, and Cardel ships more than two dozen of each, from warm and earthy through cool, bold, and neutral. Every scheme carries a light mode and a dark mode, so readers who prefer dark get a version you did not have to design.

Pick from the carousels and the page changes as you choose. You are never guessing at a swatch.

If you would rather describe what you want than browse, AI Theme Suggest takes a sentence, proposes a look, and shows it to you live.

When you do save, you choose whether the change applies to your website only or to your website and emails, so your newsletter and other emails can match your site theme and fonts without a second design pass.

Your branding kit, generated from one file

Upload one square logo or icon and Cardel will generate your icons and other branding assets, aligned with your site them and fonts.

Cardel writes the whole set: a favicon for the browser tab, a header mark, a footer mark, and name-and-logo lockups in light and dark, at the sizes each spot on your site actually needs. You then choose which mark appears in the tab, the header, and the footer.

You do not need to open a design tool. You do not need to export files at six sizes. You upload one file and watch Cardel do it for you.

Your pages

Every site starts with the pages a creator usually needs: About, Blog, Videos, Newsletter, and Contact. Any of them can be hidden if it is not for you, and the header and footer links disappear with it.

Beyond those, Page Builder creates two kinds of custom page with a URL you choose:

• A Showcase page for work people browse. A gallery, a portfolio, a catalog of chapters. Every item gets its own detail page with a full image or a YouTube video and as much writing as it deserves.

• A Shop page for work people act on. Each item can carry a price and a button.

That button is where a Shop page earns its keep. Each item picks its own action: Buy on this site for Stripe checkout without the visitor ever leaving, a custom link out to wherever you already sell, or Schedule to send someone to your booking page. Items you are not ready to show stay hidden.

The Art Gallery and Consultations pages on the demo site are one of each, built exactly this way.

Your Home page is built from the same parts. Choose a hero photo, headline, and intro, then stack up to four scrolling sections underneath: your blog, your videos, your newsletter, your About, your contact, or any Showcase or Shop page you have made. There is also an optional progress block for anyone building toward something in public, with a milestone, a current challenge, and a progress bar.

Your writing

The blog is a real blog, not an afterthought.

Write in a rich editor with headings, formatting, links, and uploaded images. Writing check underlines spelling as you go. Add tags, and add a social image so the link looks deliberate when someone shares it.

Then choose how it goes out: Publish now, Save as Draft, or Schedule it for a specific date and time. Scheduled posts go live on their own, and your post list filters by All, Published, Scheduled, or Draft so nothing gets lost.

Readers who sign in can comment, reply to each other, and like posts and comments. You moderate from Admin, where you can hide or delete anything that does not belong. Your blog also publishes an RSS feed, so readers who follow by reader app are not left out.

If you want the post to reach your list, tick Trigger Workflow(s) and the email goes out when the post goes live, including on a scheduled publish.

Your audience, in your account

Your contacts belong to you, in a real CRM inside your Admin.

Organize people into Groups, which are what you send to, and Tags, which are how campaigns make decisions. Search, filter by status or group or tag, and update people in batches. Bring an existing list in by CSV import, and take it back out by export whenever you want.

Signups from your public newsletter page use double opt-in: someone subscribes, gets a confirmation email, and only counts once they confirm. When you add people yourself or import a list, Cardel asks you to attest that you have consent. That is deliberate. A list built carelessly is the fastest way to lose the ability to send at all.

Your email

Cardel sends two kinds of emails.

Transactional email is the plumbing: subscribe confirmations, welcome notes, order updates, password resets. It is unlimited on every plan, because throttling a receipt would be absurd.

Marketing email is where plan limits apply, and it comes in three shapes:

1. Newsletter is a one-off send. Write it, align it to your desired format and theme, pick your groups, and send it. You can save templates to re-use them for different groups or adjust them later.

2. Bulk email workflows automatically fire on something happening: a new blog post, a new video, a new shop or showcase item. Set it up once and your subscriber list hears from you every time you trigger the applicable update.

3. Campaign workflows are automated sequences. They start when someone subscribes, resubscribes, or unsubscribes, and then step through Send, Wait, and Condition, branching on groups and tags. A welcome series that behaves differently for a paying reader than a new one is a few steps, with an easy to use setup page, not a technical project.

Every template is editable in three ways: a visual editor, plain text, and raw HTML for when you know exactly what you want. The AI Email Template Builder will draft one from a description, and each build can be reverted step by step.

Your From addresses are yours to manage, and send history shows what went out, with the ability to cancel a run in progress or retry one that stumbled.

Your inbox, in one place

Readers reach you three ways: your contact form, an email to your address, and the chat widget on your site. All three land in one Messaging Center.

Threads stay threaded, so a back-and-forth over email is one conversation, not eight. Filter by unread, replied, or archived. Reply from the same screen, choosing which of your addresses it comes from. Compose starts a new message with To, Cc, and Bcc when you need to reach out first.

AI Suggest will draft a reply for you. It never sends. You read it, change what you want, and press send yourself.

The chat widget has an online and offline toggle, so you can be reachable when you want to be and quiet when you do not.

Selling and booking

Connect Stripe from Admin and your Shop items can take payment on your own site. Money goes to your Stripe account. Cardel takes a 0.5% application fee on those card sales; Stripe's own processing fees are separate.

Every purchase becomes an order in your Admin, with fulfillment status, payment status, and a place for your notes. You can rename the statuses to match how you actually work, and attach an email template to each one so customers hear from you as their order moves. Sold something offline or through another channel? You can add orders manually in the same list so your sales summary covers everything.

Booking works the same way. Connect up to three Google or Outlook calendars. Cardel reads them for conflicts, so it will never offer a slot you are already busy for, and it can write confirmed bookings back to the calendar you choose. Set your timezone, weekly hours, meeting length, buffer between meetings, minimum notice, and how far ahead people can book.

Then publish your booking page. Visitors see open times only, never the titles of what you are doing instead. They pick a slot, leave their name and a note, and the invite goes out.

Get a feel for it on the demo site. The Consultations page has both: items priced for checkout and a booking flow behind them.

Your team

You do not have to run everything alone. Invite people by email and give each one access to only the sections they need. Someone can moderate comments and answer messages without ever seeing your billing, your audience, or your Stripe connection.

Billing, user management, and the AI Assistant tab stay with you as the owner.

AI that drafts, never decides

Cardel has five AI features, and they share one rule: everything is a draft you approve.

• AI Assistant rides along on every Admin page and knows your documentation, so "how do I schedule a post" gets answered where you are, not in a help center in another tab.

• AI Theme Suggest turns a description of a mood into a real theme preview.

• AI Email Template Builder drafts an email from a sentence.

• AI Suggest drafts a reply in your inbox.

• Writing check catches spelling as you write a post.

Every plan includes a monthly token budget shared across all of it, and your usage meter is on your billing page so nothing is a surprise.

Your domain, your address

You can run on .cardel.io or .cardel.community with a subdomain, or bring a domain of your own on any paid plan.

A domain of your own is recommended if you are sending marketing emails to your customers, but is not required.

Connecting your down domain is guided step-by-step in Cardel, each handing you a small table of records to paste at your DNS host: prove ownership, point the domain at Cardel, then optionally set up receiving and sending email on your domain. The first two decide whether you can save. The email steps are recommended, not required, and they are what turn you@yourdomain.com into an address that both sends your newsletter and delivers replies into your Messaging Center.

Every field copies with one click, and the record names are written the way DNS hosts expect.

You can configure your domain in guided mode, or at: www.cardel.io/workspaces

Built to be found, and built for everyone

Search engines and screen readers were not bolted on at the end.

Every public page carries its own title and description. Posts get share images so links look right in a message. Your site publishes an XML sitemap for crawlers, a readable site map for people, and an RSS feed for your blog. Private pages, your Admin, your account, and unpublished drafts stay out of all of it. If you want to claim the site in Google Search Console or Bing, there is a field for the token.

Public pages are built to meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards, along with the Admin sections you work in every day. Keyboard navigation, landmarks, focus that is actually visible, contrast that holds up. Your readers should not need a particular pair of eyes or a particular mouse to read your work.

What it costs

You can build the entire site before you have to pay anything. Answer the questions, fill in the pages, preview the finished website. You subscribe to a plan when you are ready to publish it to the world.

Every paid plan includes the whole foundation: your own domain, Editor Mode, all the themes and fonts, the brand kit generator, your own blog with comments and likes, videos, managing your audience, email templates on your own domain, bulk emails, the Messaging Center with chat, documentation, and the AI Assistant. Transactional email is unlimited on every plan.

The tiers differ in room and reach:

• Starter is for sharing your work. One Showcase page, one Shop page, ten shop items, ten thousand contacts, and thirty thousand marketing emails a month. Shop items link out to wherever you already sell. You run it yourself.

• Pro is for growing your audience. It unlocks campaign workflows, Stripe checkout and orders on your own site, the scheduling tool and booking calendar, plus five admin users with per-section permissions. Five Showcase and five Shop pages, fifty items, twenty-five thousand contacts, seventy-five thousand marketing emails a month.

• Business is for scaling your brand. Unlimited Showcase and Shop pages and unlimited items, fifty thousand contacts, a hundred and fifty thousand marketing emails a month, fifteen admin users, the largest AI budget, and priority support.

Yearly billing runs well under twelve months of monthly plan pricing (2+ months free if paid yearly). Current pricing, the full feature comparison, and a small estimator that suggests a plan from your numbers are all on the pricing page.

What is yours

Your site. Your domain. Your audience list, exportable any day you want it. Your Stripe account, with the money landing in it directly. Your writing, your images, your brand.

You are the Forgemaster. Cardel is the forge.

Have a look at a full setup demo, walk around a demo site, or read more about why we built Cardel. When you are ready, get started and answer the first question: what will your site name be?

The first blank page is the hardest part. Let us get you past it.