Web Sites

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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A bunch of the folks on this forum have web sites. I think it would be useful to rest of us to know how they went about it. Did they use one of the template services; did they hire someone to set up their site? Did they do it themselves? And what do they think makes up a good web site? Any examples of sites they admire?

Any other thoughts would be useful, too.

Bill
 
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Well, I'll start with mine.

My website is just a Wordpress Blog that I heavily modified to have its own photo gallery management built in. I ddin't want to write a CMS from the ground up like I had for previous verisons of my website, nor did I want to use a dedicated gallery application as every one I tried had pretty lousy support for content management. Wordpress has great content managment, but no real gallery support, but since my gallery needs were less then my content management needs, I went with it. I've been building & designing web sites professionally for almost three years now, and doing them as a past time fore a decade now, so creating the site to do exactly what I wanted it to do wasn't too hard.
 
K,

How did you link the two together? I have not kept up with scripting/programming options over the past 10 years other than some application server solutions.

I do not have a site. I'd like to, but time goes between very limited to negative (read nowhere near enough time to go to the bathroom). I really should, got tons of stuff I'd love to share.

Thanks.

B2 (;->
 
My sites are all built on my own really basic template system and my own gallery scripts... mostly because I wanted them to work a particular way and modifying other existing packages to fit would have been more work than just writing my own.

But then, I already knew what I was doing )having worked as a web developer in the past), so that obviously is not the solution for most people....

j
 
BillBingham2 said:
How did you link the two together? I have not kept up with scripting/programming options over the past 10 years other than some application server solutions.
Click to expand...

Wordpress is all ran off of php scripts & mysql databases. I just created a few more mysql tables to store the data about each photo I want to post, and wrote a plug-in in php to let me administer that database via the wordpress control panel. From there, the gallery pages are just custom written wordpress pages that query the databases I set up to display the info on my photos.
 
Zenfolio costs me $45.00 per year for unlimited storage ... I quite like the way the site is structured and I like the way it looks. My son who understands these things better than me showed me how to buy and register a domain name and link it to Zenfolio. I've had some cards printed with my domain address on them and the whole setup cost me less than $100.00 for photo hosting, web address and bussiness cards.

It amazes me that all this can be done for this amount of money! :)
 
I built mine from scratch using Dreamweaver. It has a glitch here and there but I knew absolutely nothing about building a website. It's all trial and error. But i like how it turned out anyway. Hosted by GoDaddy for something like $5 a month i think.
 
I did mine with Dreamweaver and then hack bits of code from other sources to accomplish what I want. I considered things like J!Album, Simple Viewer etc but just didn't like them. My hosting costs £2.98 a month with my own domain name. I considered ClickPic but with the ammount of photos I wanted to show it ran about £80 a year. I think a good website is easily navigable, uses a fairly muted colourscheme and lets people see the images clearly. One site I like is www.angryskies.co.uk

Cheers, Lol
 
I'm like pesphoto in that I have my photo site hosted and registered by GoDaddy. I manage things through GoLive, and typed up the simple css the site uses myself. Nothing fancy, but it works.
 
For my (non photo) site I use GoLive because that's what I bought years ago and even though I've upgraded now and then I've never changed to Dreamweaver.
 
You would imagine that with all this talent that this site could benefit from a makeover from somebody who knows what they're up to.

Go on CameraQuest, ask somebody to give your site a tweak.
 
I programmed mine from scratch. I built the server, installed FreeBSD, set up and configured Apache, PHP, etc etc etc

GMAPhoto.com

It is a pain, and my upload interface has been so far a 2-year project, because I hardly have time to spend programming it. I had to drop setting it up further the way that I want in order to save my relationship.

So, unless you're retired or wealthy, do go with a template website. Or pay someone else to do it.

I'm going to have to pick up my project again and start from scratch...again.

This time I'm wiser (I think). I'll buy a Flash template and adjust the ActionScript part, and program only the upload interface.

Zenfolio is another option; I've seen a number of you guys use it (Ferider and Keith, for example) well.
 
I decided to use a template (Clikpic) because I know nothing whatsoever about building a website and, frankly, have no desire to learn.

I think it is important that sites are simple and clear, the object is to showcase the photography not the web design - whenever I come across a site that is full of gizmos and gimmicks, I just shut down and move on.
 
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