What are you using for your online portfolio?

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nightfly

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I'm a web developer and a photographer and was asked by a friend to create a portfolio site for him. I've done custom content management systems for people in the past (including my own porfolio site), customized Wordpress sites etc but wanted to create something that is really easy for him to use and that he can connect to Shutterfly for selling prints etc.

Was wondering what type of out of the box or custom solutions people here use. Don't really want to re-invent the wheel here but would like to give him something that's professional looking yet easy to use.
 
I have my own site, html built from a template I found and felt could be molded to what I need. Easy enough for me to update but I'm not sure it would work in this case. Wouldn't a wordpress or blog style site be the easiest to update?
 
Yeah, the problem with Wordpress is that it really isn't photo focused. I have a Wordpress install I set up for my own photoblog but I find it a bit cumbersome and I think if it was more of a portfolio site, Wordpress wouldn't be my first choice. For just a photoblog, Tumblr is hard to beat, although your stuff lives on their servers.

Will do some digging, just thought someone might have one that they love. It would be great if there was something photo focused that dealt with things like batch uploading photos and let you create sets and set up private areas to show works to clients etc.

There is so much great stuff out there, just wanted to see if there was something I'm unaware of before I build a custom CMS or hack the hell out of Wordpress or similar.
 
nightfly said:
For just a photoblog, Tumblr is hard to beat, although your stuff lives on their servers.
Click to expand...

I use tumblr for two of my sites:

www.the-365-project.com
pdexposures.tumblr.com

As you can see, the later hasn't been updated in some time. I find it the be not as founded as other blog services.

What I mean by that is the majority of it's users are under 21. There is a large mentality amongst the user base to follow follow follow and like like like. At Tumblr meetings or get togethers I have attended people admit to just following for the heck of it, not because of an actual interest in what you may be producing. Not only that but "I always follow back" is a common phrase.

While this may get you more "likes" and followers (I have close to 400 on each of those two I listed above) and yet I receive little to no actual feedback. In comparison, I have a handful of followers on my Blogspot

blog.pdexposures.com

And yet I have a much higher search engine ranking, and get more comments and people recognizing and seeking me out for what I do. Rather than just glancing at a photo and moving on.

Personally, I find tumblr easy to beat.
 
My own site, built around the Cartweaver shopping cart/cms, which I heavily modified (it includes all the source code and the license allows you to rewrite it as much as you want, so I did!). I modified it to make it more suited to selling photos by allowing the user to enter custom alt tags or images.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions.

The client is a friend and I had him take a look at Smugmug and he really liked it so that's what we are going with.
 
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