My New Website - Created Entirely With an Affordable Third Party Lightroom Plugin

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david.elliott

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Hello all,

For several years, I have been exporting my photos to galleries using lightroom's web module. This meant that I was always linking friends and family to separate galleries as I processed new rolls of film. I consolidated some time ago into a flickr account, but I prefer to host my photos on my own webspace. The search for a way to do this for a reasonable and affordable amount of money began.

Having investigated and tried out a number of products, I settled on Impact Web Site Publisher Pro, a third party plugin for lightroom. There is a free trial which contains a major limitation - three photos are shown and thats it for the gallery. Basically it is just for you to see if you like the product and if it works well for you. The cost for the full version (no limitations) is approximately $40. I have found the product to be well worth the price. The layout takes a bit of getting used to, but on the whole is very user friendly. Essentially the plugin just adds a bunch more options to the web module. The guide walks you through pretty much everything. I have no connection to the product other than being a very happy customer. Here is a link to the product webpage for those of you who are interested. Impact Web Site Publisher Pro

And, I am pleased to link you to my new website, so that you may see what I created via the plugin over the course of a few nights. Note that the website seems to render best in safari, but works well in firefox and camino, as well as internet explorer. Rendered In Silver.

I hope that the product recommendation is helpful and I naturally hope that you enjoy my website and my photographs.

Best regards,

David
 
FWIW, the site looks good in Chrome, too.

It's very clean and simple, and your photos are lovely, thanks! Two criticisms: one, it's very slow to load...you might consider moving to a better server someday. And two, I'm not sure that the separate categorization of film and digital images would be of any relevance to anyone except other technically inclined photographers. You might instead try presenting different series of photos based on content or aesthetics.
 
I am using Impact Web Site Publisher Pro with LR3 to completely redo my commercial and artistic photography web sites. I find the Impact Web Site Publisher Pro to be very useful and worth every penny.

It is trivial to build a simple site. After studying the documentation and examples on the WSPP web site, you can create a highly customized site. WSPP is surprisingly flexible. There are SEO tools as well. Best of all there is no Flash. You are able to scale your site so it works on iPads and iPhones and other mobile platforms.

I wish I had my new web sites done so you could see them. But a month of mind numbing winter weather here in the U.S. Mid West sent me into hibernation. Now that the weather has improved, I have to get back to work.
 
mabelsound said:
FWIW, the site looks good in Chrome, too.

It's very clean and simple, and your photos are lovely, thanks! Two criticisms: one, it's very slow to load...you might consider moving to a better server someday. And two, I'm not sure that the separate categorization of film and digital images would be of any relevance to anyone except other technically inclined photographers. You might instead try presenting different series of photos based on content or aesthetics.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

Happy to hear it works well in Chrome. Hmm, slow loading? Guess I need to give godaddy a call and see what they can do about that. Thank you for the heads up.

Once I have more photos up, I plan to redo the categories to macro, nature, portraits, minimalist work, etc. But, for now, I did not feel that I had enough photos up to justify breaking down the galleries.
 
willie_901 said:
I am using Impact Web Site Publisher Pro with LR3 to completely redo my commercial and artistic photography web sites. I find the Impact Web Site Publisher Pro to be very useful and worth every penny.

It is trivial to build a simple site. After studying the documentation and examples on the WSPP web site, you can create a highly customized site. WSPP is surprisingly flexible. There are SEO tools as well. Best of all there is no Flash. You are able to scale your site so it works on iPads and iPhones and other mobile platforms.

I wish I had my new web sites done so you could see them. But a month of mind numbing winter weather here in the U.S. Mid West sent me into hibernation. Now that the weather has improved, I have to get back to work.
Click to expand...

Please share your new sites once they are complete. :)
 
Hey David, that looks cool. I have been looking for something similar too. I have zenfolio but it is not flexible and I cant change it the way I want.

I have questions. First of all thanks for sharing this with us.

1) Does it give you webspace too or you need to find yourself.
2) what are the sizes of the images you put. Mine is showing slow too.

Thanks!
 
LeicaFoReVer said:
Hey David, that looks cool. I have been looking for something similar too. I have zenfolio but it is not flexible and I cant change it the way I want.

I have questions. First of all thanks for sharing this with us.

1) Does it give you webspace too or you need to find yourself.
2) what are the sizes of the images you put. Mine is showing slow too.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

(1) You need to provide your own webspace.

(2) I uploaded both low res and medium res files. Lower resolution ones are used by mobile devices and medium for laptops and desktops. High res files can be uploaded with custom dimensions but I did not do that.

The site loads very quickly for me at home and at work, even after clearing cache and/or resetting the browsers. Not sure why there seem to be slow loading issues, but my guess is that it has to do with my host (godaddy).
 
Your website looks nice, very clean and minimalistic and nothing to distract the user from the images, the way a photography website should be. It loads fairly quickly for me, each image takes about a second to load which is reasonable.

I recently created my own website too, using godaddy for my domain but a company in the UK for my hosting. I haven't had any problems with godaddy so far, here's hoping it stays that way. My site is just a wordpress blog with a template on it, but I think it looks and functions pretty well. Check it out - http://daveferrie.com
 
Last edited:
The site is really nice and with a simple layout. It loads very quickly for me.

I had two questions and you have answered one about providing your own webspace.

The other question I had was whether you are able to include galleries of thumps that you can click on to see the full res image?

I notice when you click on a gallery on your site, you are shown one image at a time. I like this approached but was just wondering if it's possible to show a page of thumbs instead?

Great Work!
 
daveisbest said:
Your website looks nice, very clean and minimalistic and nothing to distract the user from the images, the way a photography website should be. It loads fairly quickly for me, each image takes about a second to load which is reasonable.

I recently created my own website too, using godaddy for my domain but a company in the UK for my hosting. I haven't had any problems with godaddy so far, here's hoping it stays that way. My site is just a wordpress blog with a template on it, but I think it looks and functions pretty well. Check it out - http://daveferrie.com
Click to expand...

Thank you. I will check out your site this evening. :)
 
EyeofSearle said:
The site is really nice and with a simple layout. It loads very quickly for me.

I had two questions and you have answered one about providing your own webspace.

The other question I had was whether you are able to include galleries of thumps that you can click on to see the full res image?

I notice when you click on a gallery on your site, you are shown one image at a time. I like this approached but was just wondering if it's possible to show a page of thumbs instead?

Great Work!
Click to expand...

Absolutely. The plugin provides for several different views, one of which is a page of thumbs. The plugin calls it a contact sheet view.

Thanks!
 
Ok, so how much does it cost to get a webspace like that?

And I dont have a lightroom sofware, how much is that software? Is there any standalone version?

Yes I like also the simplistic format! so you only see the photos no fancy icons bars etc
 
LeicaFoReVer said:
Ok, so how much does it cost to get a webspace like that?

And I dont have a lightroom sofware, how much is that software? Is there any standalone version?

Yes I like also the simplistic format! so you only see the photos no fancy icons bars etc
Click to expand...

For webspace you need a domain and you need hosting. The domain cost me around $20 for private registration. Hosting costs me $6.99 a month if I remember right.

There is no standalone version of the plugin. Lightroom costs $299, but is significantly less if you qualify for the education discount. Lightroom is an adobe program that lets you catalog and edit your photos. I do all of my processing in it.
 
For my galleries I use SimpleViewer Pro, which is an extension of the web output plug-in that comes with Lightroom. It's also about $40.00, and allows endless modifications of the default LR product.

I insert the galleries into a simple page shell done in Dreamweaver. My home page and galleries menu are also simple Dreamweaver pages.

It's nice that with a few color and format changes you can get away from the stock look of the standard LR web output that you see everywhere.

John
 
LeicaFoReVer said:
Ok, so how much does it cost to get a webspace like that?

And I dont have a lightroom sofware, how much is that software? Is there any standalone version?

Yes I like also the simplistic format! so you only see the photos no fancy icons bars etc
Click to expand...

As another option, you may also want to check out the JALBUM software. It's free to download and comes with many, many skins (templates). I chose the "Turtle" skin for my website. Of course, you do have to sign up for web hosting with Godaddy or some other hosting company.
 
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