need website advice.. setting up first time..

[orenrcohen]

I'm interested in setting up a website for my street photography.. Something to showcase my work to potential galleries, collectors, etc. I don't have any experience setting up websites and I don't have an abundance of time, therefore I am looking at some of the "canned" all in one hosting design platforms.. Clikpic, Bludomain, etc.. Although nice they seem geared to wedding photographers rather than fine arts photographers.. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks in advance..

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

If you really don't have the time or knowledge to do it yourself, I'd either hire a web designer to design a unique site for you or use Flickr. Canned sites look awful, they look like hundreds of other people's sites and as you said none are made for artists. Best to have a custom designed site unique to you. I understand not wanting to do that, it takes a while to learn the basics of web design, longer still to be skilled as a designer (that is, making it look good artistically as opposed to the merely technical aspects of putting a site together) and web designers who do good work are expensive. I recommend Flickr because it is well known, works well, is not posing as a unique site while really being a design shared my lots of others, and is cheap.

 

[johannielscom]

I recommend Blogger.com. Quite easy and easily found through Google.

There's a thread on photo.net with quite some questions and answers.

Good luck!

 

[wgerrard]

I'll second the advice from Chris. I've built a few websites and spent a fair amount of professional time as the intermediary between web designers and developers and the people paying them to build the sites. Make no mistake, web site design and development (not necessarily the same thing) are serious skills. If you want a site that is tuned to meet your specific requirements with a unique professional appearance, you probably need them.

Another, cheaper, alternative is to use a canned code package like one of those you mentioned. To a degree, such packages can be tweaked to meet individual choices, especially if you can write code.

A variation on that are online sites like SmugMug. These essentially offer canned code packages with the ability to adjust a site's appearance, but handle all the backend and server maintenance duties. That is a Very Good Thing in my book as it relieves you of the responsibility for managing you own server, which includes tasks like upgrading software remotely, handling security issues, responding to a crash (and knowing there's a security issue and knowing what you need to do to prevent a crash), etc. Playing systems administrator for a web server is not to be dismissed casually.

A third and even cheaper alternative is the free or almost-free blog site like Blogger or wordpress.com. A number of photoblog themes, some free, some not, are available.

I'd spend some time perusing the web looking for sites you like. The software behind the site is often credited somewhere on the home page. Sites built from scratch by a designer/developer usually include a credit, often in the footer.

 

[Bnack]

I put one together with photobiz.com... I think it's not too bad. I think their formats work better for horizontally framed photos, and less so for vertical or square photos. My photobiz site is listed below ... I think it's not too bad for the money.

 

[aniMal]

Flickr is a good idea for a start, and the good thing is that you can then later on make a private site. It is easy to embed photos from flickr in any site, that way you use the superior servers and upload/edit tools of flickr for the management of you photos, and then add some personal design afterwards. You will also then be present both at flickr (or an equivalent) and you own site.

If you really want to build something personal, do think it over and specify exactly what you want. There are lots of webdesigners who offer a lot for the money, and then ends up with a lot of trouble in different ways. To find someone who are skilled and has a reasonable price, you need to be a little streetwise.

I am in the process of launching a small company for web-development myself, so far we have a reliable programmer/designer working for us in Nepal. If you are interested, I could provide you a direct contact with him. (we normally charge an overhead)

Anyway, good luck - its a lot of technical sides and considerations that are wise to tackle early on, rather than later!

 

[kxl]

IMHO, the options are:

1) A professionally-designed and developed website is a good option, albeit potentially expensive, depending on the design and complexity, and how often and how many changes you want to make going forward (all of which you must negotiate before you sign the contract). As with any professional service, some are good, some are very good and some are just waste of money.

2) Online gallery such as smugmug, zenfolio, etc... Built in galleries are advantageous, but to get the most out of it, you'd have to customize the presentation.

3) Do-it-yourself - you could get as fancy as you want given the expertise, but without the skills, you'd need to find an easy way to do it, and use something like JALBUM (which allows you to choose from many skins) to build your gallery.

WHAT I DID

A couple of days ago, I decided to go with Option 3. After selecting a domain name and signing up for web hosting (both through inmotionhosting), I installed/activated Wordpress (easily done via inmotionhosting's cpanel menus), and loaded the Zach 990 Wordpress template. The rest of it -- loading the photos, adding descriptions, captions, etc... have been pretty straightforward.

The advantage of a photoblog is that it allows me to showcase selected photos and display LARGE images rather than post a bunch of photos in an online gallery. The template also allows search capabilities, as well as feedback from visitors.

Check it out. (It's also referenced in my signature.)

BTW, my development skills are also somewhat minimal.

Good luck!

 

[back alley]

mine is a fill in the blank template site from 'intuit', they have over 20k templates and about 18 pages specifically for photographers.
i got the domain name and server space all in one package.

good enough for my needs.

 

[yoyo22]

I have a website based on the Joomla CMS with a theme I customized for the use with a SlideshowPro Flash gallery.
The CMS makes editing the content of the site easy, while the gallery is managed by the SlideshowPro administrator panel.

 

[Paddy C]

I'm a graphic designer and part of my business is designing and building web sites for a variety of clients.

A lot of the canned sites tend to be cheese IMO. And sites like flickr are, well, flickr. I would have trouble taking someone seriously who said "you can check my work out on flickr." Yours and about a million other so-so photographers who got a DSLR for Christmas.

One tool I've worked with on a couple occasions and that would seriously be worth looking at is SlideShowPro:

http://slideshowpro.net/

Get a domain name. Find someone who knows a little bit about web sites to create a look and feel for you, and drop a slightly tweaked slideshowpro player on top. Slideshowpro director is an incredibly easy but sophisticated way to upload, organize, and present your work.

And it's cheap.

I think they even offer hosting.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

There's no question that Flash creates search issues. But I think for certain sites it's not important.

After all, no one (or at least no one of value to your business) is going to be searching randomly for a photographer, find your site and, as a result, hire you. This sort of work is more word-of-mouth, exposure. I really don't see search results as being critical.

A lot of photographers seem to be moving to a Flash based portfolio site and a blog. The blog brings the search hits and shows you are active. The portfolio site is always there to show the range of work.

That's not true, I have gotten a few jobs doing product photography from people searching for photographers in my city online. Last time was for a company in Texas that makes the heating/air conditioning units used in hotel rooms. They needed one shot installed in a hotel room and they wanted it done at a hotel that had just been built in a small town near me, so that the room and the heater/AC unit would both look very new and nice. I made enough money to live for a week from one photo.

 

[fixbones]

I set up my blog with wordpress and prophoto2. Have a look. Dead easy and plenty of options to customize.
Also, the search engine optimization with wordpress is great

 

[Frank Petronio]

There is canned and then there is canned... Not all the canned stuff is bad. The best is better than what the best individuals could ever do on their own.

Consider Dripbook, which is sort of like LiveBooks Lite (LiveBooks starts at $480/yr I think, but that is for a minimal site). $225/yr allows you to export a customized client-friendly Flash site to your own domain name. I am using it for www.frankpetronio.net. So far it has been great and I like it as well as LiveBooks.

My main website is a blog and static galleries, www.frankpetronio.com. The blog is a customized Movable Type installation from 2004-5. It works really well but it had about 20 hrs of developer time and hundreds of hours of my time invested -- and now it is getting dated. But I've got almost 600 posts on it....

Having the blog as the main site and the Flash site as the secondary site is a bit bassackwards, the opposite of what most commercial photographers do. And while I hate to be a conformist, clients expect consistency and simply want to size you up ASAP. If I were doing it over I would probably lead with a conservative Drip or LiveBooks style Flash presentation instead of the blog, as most buyers want a clean, simple and FAST look. Buyers have modern browsers and fast connections, I wouldn't worry about professional clients seeing your 1000 pixel wide images -- they can. Then I'd just do a Blogger blog as i think their archive management is pretty good and gee... it's free.

While I am not very familar with it, I'd also look into using Flickr for image management and use it to populate customized galleries. Flickr is amazing and a lot of serious clients do indeed look at Flickr, but what I am saying is that you don't have to show that your photos are coming from Flickr. You can do both, which is good marketing.

For that matter, I've seen really nice photographer's websites using Tumbler.

I have two friends using WordPress on my server and while WordPress is powerful and easy to use, I've gotten two malicious attacks because of it. So I'm sorry they used it.

I get work from my websites all the time, international stuff too. I rather get jobs from motivated clients than to go press the flesh and kiss ass for generic local crap ;-)

The downside is that I get 99% of my hits from wankers and photographers like you, probably because I shoot attractive women. It's not a big problem but the spank monkeys don't give me any money, at least they could buy a print or two, geez....

I've had a website since 1995 and have worked in the dot.com industry as a designer and CD. But I wouldn't look backward too far... what I did in 2005 isn't what I'd do today.

Got it? Dripbook, Blogger, Flickr, Tumbler... keep it cheap and canned.

 

[robinsonphotography]

I use bludomain for my hosting and got my template from them--there are better options (into the darkroom, showit, etc, come highly recommended) but bludomain is pretty darn cheap and I think they have some pretty nice looking photographer-specific websites. Mine is www.evanrobinsonphotgraphy.com, i know www.theimageisfound.com is another one, and there are many more bludomain sites out there.

I also use flickr, it's a great tool to have and it's easy to have lots of people see your work on it.

 

[35mmdelux]

Smugmug. Keep it simple. All the "jazzy" stuff winds up looking dated and cheesy.