ShesaLikeableBiBear Posted February 5, 2008 Share Posted February 5, 2008 Have seen that a couple of you have your own websites where you showcase your photographic works. Am hoping to start out in dog and horse photography initially. Am doing a couple of photography courses to enhance knowledge See that through betterphoto.com you can "get" a website. Any other recommendations?. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rubiton Posted February 5, 2008 Share Posted February 5, 2008 www.mrsite.co.uk Very easy and because its based in the UK they are there evenings our time to help (Friday evening I asked for help had it all fixed within the hour!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tess32 Posted February 5, 2008 Share Posted February 5, 2008 Do you mind spending or after freebie? How good are you at customising stuff, that kinda thing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bridgie_cat Posted February 5, 2008 Share Posted February 5, 2008 is a photography website dif to a usual website? I would be interested to know where you can setup a freebie website incase I want to make one in the future Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShesaLikeableBiBear Posted February 5, 2008 Author Share Posted February 5, 2008 Have a webdesigner for current sites, but too expensive if I want to upload lots of photos. Hopefully will learn customising in the next few weeks. Dont mind spending if its easy to use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PossumCorner Posted March 8, 2008 Share Posted March 8, 2008 Have seen that a couple of you have your own websites where you showcase your photographic works. .... Any other recommendations? How is the search for the website going? A basic site on Smugmug is $US40 a year - a big plus is that it is pop-up and advertisement free so does not insult people's intelligence with tacky banners of 'junk-mail' - I think having an ads-free website is worth the few dollars. They do free trial for two weeks so you can see how you like it before joining. Also has a good helpful forum covering general photography. If it works for you, and you decide later to upgrade to a professional site, that is about $120/150 a year. P-base is about the same cost I think: quite a few Dolers use either Smugmug or P-base sites (or both). With Smugmug, if you like it but don't wish to appear to your clients to be part of a 'photo hosting' site, you can even use your own website address, customise the look of it if you wish (but not necessary) and hide the fact that it is a Smugmug site. .... Bridgie Cat said "is a photography website dif to a usual website?" .... The main differences are the number of photographs you can put on the site, and making it easy for your clients/friends to look at them. The usual website is so limited that you wouldn't bother: just a few images and it is full, and difficult to work through. With a good photo-hosting website it will carry as many shots as you like to put there, with galleries for public viewing, or private galleries that only the dog owner, wedding party, whoever you choose, can access by password. Flickr would also be worth looking at to compare cost and service. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dodger Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 This is a difficult issue, with a number of factors that make it just confusing enough to cause some pretty major consternation. Ultimately, though, it comes down to what you want to accomplish from your internet presence as not just a photographer, but a person running a business. It's different for everyone, but when I sat down to figure it out for myself, I had some specific requirements. I wanted more complete control over not just the content and structure of the site, but service delivery as well - basically, client flow from browsing to ordering to order fulfillment. While hosting sites like Smugmug et al are terrific, and great value for the money, using their value-added services such as the shopping cart and order-fullfillment can be problematic for an Australian-based photographer, leaving you with the irksome issue of having to find some other way to do these things. Now, I knew from the start that I wanted to do my own printing. I was willing to make the investment in a high-end, dedicated photograph printer so that I could be absolutely sure that the product my clients recieved was one I had made myself and was satisfied with. I also knew that I wanted to focus more on photography and printing than I did the troublesome and mundane middle area of order taking and bank transactions. Here I had to begin to make compromises - PayPal offers some terrific options for vendors (not just eBay vendors, either) that take this part of the transaction and make it dead easy for everyone. Their fees are a wee bit high, but when you factor in the cost of your time manually putting through credit card transactions as well as the bank fees for a vendor account, this becomes an economical alternative. Their proprietary shopping cart system is very bare-bones however, and though I did experiment with it when I first set up my site, I realised quick off that it simply would not suit my needs. After a little searching I found a very versatile gallery/shopping cart system made specifically for photographers, and snapped it up. For me, another worthwhile investment, as it solved not only the problem of providing a solid client flow through the transaction process, but came with a very impressive gallery database system right out of the box that didn't require a computer science degree to setup. PossumCorner (Love that nick!) brings up the biggest, and most consternating issue of all and makes a great argument for a photograph hosting service - the amount of space you get with a web hosting company, and the number of images you can have in that space. This is a brick wall I ran into very quickly when all I had was the most basic of web hosting accounts. I had to upgrade the account to have any semblence of a decent gallery area and now, though certainly not a photo hosting site by any stretch of the imagination, I can maintain a good number of event galleries. Obviously I have to archive older galleries to add new ones, but that is actually a good thing - keeping the site fresh and inspiring return visits. I think I've come up with a very good balance for my own purposes, though for others it may be too rich an investment. I currently pay about $25 monthly for 500mb of disk space, and as part of my standard workflow I use the automation system of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to create watermarked web versions of the images I plan to post that generally average ~75kb jpeg files. This isn't meant to be an argument against hosting sites, since they provide an excellent value-added service for their clientele, but rather an example of an alternative option from someone who chose it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tess32 Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 Smugmug is pretty great, and if you get the pro one you can customise it to look like a real website anyway Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dodger Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 Smugmug is pretty great, and if you get the pro one you can customise it to look like a real website anyway I agree! It's just that you're paying for other services you can't really use, such as the shopping cart and order fulfillment systems. Their lab is in Altanta, GA, which makes selling through Smugmug to Australian clients a bit of a bother. That and the exchange rates. I wasn't trying to argue against it or any other hosting service, honestly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chezzyr Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 (edited) I myself use PBase - I wanted an ongoing, no frills way of displaying lots of images. I don't care about bells and whistles or checkouts at this point. Orders/enquiries come through on email and I attend to them personally. PBase costs me only US$23 a YEAR for 500mb of space. To give you an idea: I have more than 4000 images on there I am at about the 355mb point. I have lots of galleries and sub galleries (including numerous private galleries). eta: in the past I have had my own domain/website and even signed up for smugmug but let that lapse... Edited March 10, 2008 by chezzyr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ripley Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 I want a website just so I can collate and put up all my travel images. They are all on a portable hard drive atm and when I want to send photos to friends and families, I have to send them individually by jpeg and sometimes their email account can't handle it. So, I want a hosting site where I can put photos in by country and region and then when I go away somewhere, I can just update the photos and send the link to friends to have a look at - much easier that way. pbase looks like it would suit my needs. I don't want some site full of banners and pop ups either as that is annyoing. I was also thinking flikr but really like the dark background on pbase but I'm not using the site as a way of selling anything, it's merely for personal use and showing friends and family my travel shots. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chezzyr Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 Ripley: I feel something like PBase would suit you well. They have several 'templates' you can choose from also. I find it so easy to send my roadtrip updates to friends and family - I just send them the link to the specific gallery I have created for that trip etc. You can add descriptions for images or galleries, something I think you would like to use Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ripley Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 yep, chezzyr, I have written a few travel blogs on websites before and received emails about them from different countries which was nice. Why do you think I'm at home today? I'm doing my photos. I have way too many. My husband just about clicked at anything in Europe and I'm culling the bad ones and keeping the good ones. You have to be tough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chezzyr Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 (edited) Ripley: please add me to your 'mailing list' when you get something up and running. Might help me plan my own trip/s Culling can be good discipline. Edited March 10, 2008 by chezzyr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tess32 Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 I have about 8,000 images to cull, anyone wanna smack me over the head for leaving it this long and taking too many! I think pbase would be good too for you Ripley. I still have pbase, smugmug and my own website, I am such a website tart, hehe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ripley Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 yep, I think I'll go for that. I honestly can't believe some of the shots we took and my husband took way too many of me! He took a photo I didn't know he'd taken though. Of some oil rig off the coast of a remote Scottish beach. It's not a good photo, had it of been it would have said a lot about the location and how man impacts on a beautiful landscape. OK, back to my roadtrip photos. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cordelia Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 Loving my smugmug account too! I am a website retard so can't figure out how to make it not look like smugmug, but it doesn't irk me. I have a pro account. I don't see an issue with orders going through smugmug.... I haven't bought any of my own stuff yet but I will just to see the quality. I have a reallly good photographic printer but I may still end up using a professional print lab for pics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShesaLikeableBiBear Posted March 10, 2008 Author Share Posted March 10, 2008 No decisions made yet possumcorner, appreciate all the input here, off to have a look at PBase. Dodger, sooooooo who are you with?, had a squiz at your website, looks great, and like the format. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dodger Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 No decisions made yet possumcorner, appreciate all the input here, off to have a look at PBase.Dodger, sooooooo who are you with?, had a squiz at your website, looks great, and like the format. Thank you very much! I'm not sure what you mean when you ask who I'm with. Professionally I freelance and don't have any official affiliation with any media (though I'm working to change that). Personally, I get married in less than 3 weeks. :rolleyes: PBase is a good choice, as Smugmug would be as well :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chezzyr Posted March 10, 2008 Share Posted March 10, 2008 Patrick, I think she might mean "who do you use to host your site"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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