I don't have a photography-related website, but I'm planning on building one in the near future. I'm not quite sure where to start; I need some basic advice on what type of software, host, etc... I need. If you could also recommend brands that would be great (Dreamweaver, Smugmug etc...). If it has any importance, please bear in mind that I'm an amateur and I don't intend on selling, at least not in the foreseeable future.
You may want to start out by doing a blog first. I have a blog (two actually, but think I'll be condensing) through Google's Blogger (though the name is rumored to change soon) which is extremely easy to learn and you can get pretty diverse using different templates. Check mine out to see one example: Birds of Long Island
What I like about the Blog route is you can post your best stuff and stuff that may not be so good but may be interesting. Plus, since you are updating it periodically it's easy for people to find the latest content and easy for people to follow (this is not true when it comes to a standard parked website). Best of all it's free, so if you don't like how it works for you, you really didn't lose much!
Thanks Luke. My photography often involves travelling, and I always come back with some stories to tell from my adventures, so a blog is actually a good idea, thanks for drawing my attention to it. II'll take a look at Google blogs tomorrow. I'm still going to try to build a photography-oriented website though.
Nice blog by the way, I particularly liked the shot of the whale that you had published in Natinoal Geographic; quite dramatic.
You may not plan on selling/licensing images now, but seriously think about what the future holds. You don't want to start with a site organized/laid out one way, only to find years later that it's not compatible with the way you approach your photography (and or business) then.
I speak from experience. I began my website 10 years ago with the intention of simply sharing photos from my travels with folks, so everything was organized in trip galleries. Now? I'd be much better served having the images organized by subject rather than by trip (do people really want to peruse all 20 of my Yellowstone galleries in search of my grizzly bear photos? I doubt it.). Unfortunately, I'm now in a position where I have to convert thousands of pages to a new format, somehow without losing the high search engine rankings many of them have attained. Ha.
Bottom line: plan ahead and really think carefully about this before you start. Don't end up like me.
Building a website for today's web world is not like it was in the 90's. While there are some excellent web development tools, you cannot expect them to be drag and drop or WYSIWYG. You will need to have a working knowledge of CSS and HTML at a minimum. If you want database capability, you need to have knowledge of how to build a relational database and how to write the back end code in order to interact with them.
I use Micrsoft Expression Web. (albeit an older version). It is a professional level tool, similar to Dreamweaver, but much less expensive. There is a forum at Microsoft for Expression Web. At the top of the page is a FAQ posting with many links to excellent learning resources.
Before you take the plunge buying software, check out the resources at the link above. You must be willing to put in a great deal of time and effort to create a nice, functional site that will render well across several browsers and be standards compliant.
Creating a site is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, and I encourage you to give it a shot.
Joe,
Preston is right that if you plan on building a web site yourself, you'd better have some understanding and skills in web technologies like HTML, CSS, and maybe even Flash. I have had an IT company for 30 years and last year downsized the company so I could focus on developing my photo business. However, I had and have no intention of building my own web site simply because I would rather be in the field or travelling and taking pictures. So I opted to find a system that provided the tools to make it easy to create and manage a professional web site. Photo site providers like Flickr, Facebook, and Picassa, satify a consumer's need to quickly display images, but don't come close to offering a professional look. In the last year or more, I tried several "pro" systems like SmugMug and PhotoShelter but find them pretty good, but limited in many ways. I recently switched again to Livebooks, and find they offer the most professional looking templates and tools to display your images. I am currently working on getting my site up on livebooks, and they make easy. There are many approaches to getting a web site up and running, but if you're not technical, and you want something more professional than Flickr, then checkout systems that offer templates you can build on; you get the best of both worlds.
Glad you're asking these questions, and yes, it's a good idea to research different products to find one that is right for you from the start. I have a website and a blog and find that they both satisfy my needs. I use SmugMug for my website and even though I haven't had any sales, the feature is there. I sell my prints through exhibits or local galleries, but at least the feature is available on my website. I'm not a computer geek but I have been able to use the features on SmugMug to personalize my website, plus their customer service is the best. And the annual fee is very affordable.
I also write a blog through WordPress and the cost is free. Blogging is a great way to stay in touch with your customers, family and friends. You can use it to post images as well, but I prefer to keep the two separate. When I write a post on my blog, I post it also on my Facebook page which will direct anyone back to my blog. From my blog anyone can click on the link to my website to see my images. I also have a link on my website to my blog.
Keep doing your research and look at different websites and blogs to see what you personally like as far as layouts, looks, etc. I maintain both my website and blog and I feel it represents me and my creative side. I know there are folks out there who have a much more sophisticated website, but these two options work great for me and it's affordable.
Let us know how things work out for you. You can click on any of the links at the bottom of my post here to check out my blog and website to see how they might work for you. Best of luck.
Hello Joe,
Undoubtedly everyone who has already replied is far more qualified than I, but since my present web host expires at the end of july I had already begun looking round for a more professional replacement. I've gone with Zenfolio. They have several grades of service, so that if you want the basic display option it's quite inexpensive, and then you can upgrade to different levels when (and how) you eventually decide to start selling your images. It's user-friendly and you avoid needing a complete change of web host when you want to upgrade. (My site is still a "work in progress" so I'm not yet sharing the link publicly.)
Thanks very much to all of you for the answers and provided information.
To answer a few questions, I'm a software developer and have been focusing on Web development in the past 4-5 years, so I'm quite familiar with HTML, CSS, Javascript, databases etc... Which makes me want to find solutions that involve the least amount of having to manually develop the website with these technologies, as the last thing I'd like to do on my free time is more technical work of the same nature as my profession. I will do more research on the tools you mentioned.
I think I have enough to get started. Thank you again for your help and advice, it's all highly appreciated.
Sounds to me that your experience so far already puts you WAY ahead of the curve of the vast majority of us photog types. But I'm guessing it also gives you more insight than the rest of us.... For example, most all the professional sites you see these days, and I'm mostly referring to commercial sites, there is no single site that was developed by one person. In fact there are teams and departments that just deal with one thing, like "social media," or "navigation" or "search" or "the blog," "current events," etc. etc. Doing all that in today's web I believe is MORE than a full time job. And I think you nailed it in terms of not wanting to do your "job" in your free time.
The ONLY reason I still do my own coding is that my site has been built and added to over the years. My first website was eons ago in 1995 (yes, the Internet was already invented by Al Gore by then.)
Start a blog, make use of some sites where all the programming is done for you but gives you options for customizing. If in the end you're not happy, build your own.
Thanks for your advice. I guess the blog and the website are complimentary. I feel like I need a website in order to organize the photos in a more flexible way than the photo sharing websites which I currently use. I'm not going to expedite this whole process though; I'll take my time before delving in.
It does sound as if you're way ahead of the power curve in web development. I wish I'd known your experience level before I wrote my reply, because I would have couched it differently. No problem, though.
Just food for thought...
If you want to use Asp.Net and SQL Server, Expression Web, in conjunction with Visual Studio will get the job done for you. Use Expression Web for the design, graphics, etc, and use VS for your code behind. If you don't have VS, you can get Visual Web Developer Express for free from MS. I don't know if you're aware of it, but Dreamweaver does not support Asp.Net.
You can still use the tools mentioned above if you want to use PHP and MySQL.
Thanks Preston. I'm not really ahead of you folks; I know technologies, but a photographic website is a different entity. I mainly develop websites in the financial and health sectors, with Java-based technologies as opposed to .NET or PHP. I already took a quick look at Expression Web; it looks promising (especially the price )
I'm sorry I did not mention my experience before; I was looking for a photographer's approach to building a website. Your feedback is well appreciated.
I'm currently a software engineer tasked with maintaining and enhancing a corporate web site. We use JS, AJAX and JQuery for the client side, ASP.Net and C# for the rest of the business layer and SQL Server for the back end. Visual Studio is adequate for my purposes for HTML and CSS and for debugging ASP.Net and C#. I also like Mozilla's Firebug a lot for use in debugging. I don't have any experience with PHP or MySQL but have heard good things about them from other developers, if you don't want to go the MS route. I've been doing systems, first as a programmer and then as a project manager, for thirty years or so but have only started doing web programming in the last couple of years. So I'm trying to learn the web development technologies too and plan to spend a good part of my upcoming retirement writing web code for my own site.
I'll be interested in hearing what tools you end up using.
Pat, I'll keep you posted once I start working on the website, but it might be a while.
Question to Barbara, or users of SmugMug: Do you use any other software like DreamWeaver or is SmugMug sufficient for your needs? I'm trying to find out whether SmugMug has sufficient functionality to build and maintain the website.
Many thanks again in advance.
Posted by Graham Brown on July 15, 2011 at 6:36 PM
Joe, I am very impressed with Smugmug. I know nothing about programming but found it relatively easy to set up my website. I made a few errors on the way but on emailing them they either explained how to overcome the problem or they did it for me. Very impressed with their response time, often within an hour or two but always the same day. You don't need any other software, the range of layouts and variations is quite extensive and the analyse of trafficing to my website is impressive. Highly recommended. Graham
Hi Graham, thank you very much for your answer, it helps a lot. I'm already leaning towards Smugmug; they seem to offer what I'm looking for at affordable prices.
Joe
Posted by Richard Olsen on August 5, 2011 at 2:57 PM
Joe,
You might want to take a look at Web studio 5.0
I used it to put together my web site and it worked pretty well.
They have a trial version you can download and build a practice website.
They have a good tutorial, and search engine for questions.
They will also host your website (I didn't use that)
There are some issues with dispaying issues, but they could probably be remedied by someone more savvy than myself.
Posted by Joe Abounader on August 8, 2011 at 8:09 PM
Thanks Richard; all things considered, I think I'm going to give Smugmug a shot.
Posted by Joe Abounader on October 11, 2011 at 9:44 PM
As promised a while back, for those interested, I've decided to go with Smugmug for my photo website. As I indicated earlier, being a software developer by profession, I spend most of my days doing work in Java, Spring, Struts, j a v a s c r i p t, databases of all sorts etc... and all the other geeky buzzwords you can imagine, so the last thing I want to do on my free time is more of the same. Smugmug provides me with the opportunity to focus on the artistic and fun side of the task of creating a photography website, and to easily upload images and create galleries, and I like the layouts they offer; the price is also very affordable (I don't work for them by the way). And if one day I need to customize, the tech knowledge is there.
Thank you all for your feedback; you've been helpful as usual. I'm still working on the website, adding photos at my pace (government speed). But you'll find the link to the website alongside my NPN info below.
Discussion
19 repliesI don't have a photography-related website, but I'm planning on building one in the near future. I'm not quite sure where to start; I need some basic advice on what type of software, host, etc... I need. If you could also recommend brands that would be great (Dreamweaver, Smugmug etc...). If it has any importance, please bear in mind that I'm an amateur and I don't intend on selling, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.
Joe
What I like about the Blog route is you can post your best stuff and stuff that may not be so good but may be interesting. Plus, since you are updating it periodically it's easy for people to find the latest content and easy for people to follow (this is not true when it comes to a standard parked website). Best of all it's free, so if you don't like how it works for you, you really didn't lose much!
- Luke
Nice blog by the way, I particularly liked the shot of the whale that you had published in Natinoal Geographic; quite dramatic.
I speak from experience. I began my website 10 years ago with the intention of simply sharing photos from my travels with folks, so everything was organized in trip galleries. Now? I'd be much better served having the images organized by subject rather than by trip (do people really want to peruse all 20 of my Yellowstone galleries in search of my grizzly bear photos? I doubt it.). Unfortunately, I'm now in a position where I have to convert thousands of pages to a new format, somehow without losing the high search engine rankings many of them have attained. Ha.
Bottom line: plan ahead and really think carefully about this before you start. Don't end up like me.
Max
Building a website for today's web world is not like it was in the 90's. While there are some excellent web development tools, you cannot expect them to be drag and drop or WYSIWYG. You will need to have a working knowledge of CSS and HTML at a minimum. If you want database capability, you need to have knowledge of how to build a relational database and how to write the back end code in order to interact with them.
I use Micrsoft Expression Web. (albeit an older version). It is a professional level tool, similar to Dreamweaver, but much less expensive. There is a forum at Microsoft for Expression Web. At the top of the page is a FAQ posting with many links to excellent learning resources.
Expression Web Forum
Before you take the plunge buying software, check out the resources at the link above. You must be willing to put in a great deal of time and effort to create a nice, functional site that will render well across several browsers and be standards compliant.
Creating a site is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, and I encourage you to give it a shot.
Best of luck,
--P
Preston is right that if you plan on building a web site yourself, you'd better have some understanding and skills in web technologies like HTML, CSS, and maybe even Flash. I have had an IT company for 30 years and last year downsized the company so I could focus on developing my photo business. However, I had and have no intention of building my own web site simply because I would rather be in the field or travelling and taking pictures. So I opted to find a system that provided the tools to make it easy to create and manage a professional web site. Photo site providers like Flickr, Facebook, and Picassa, satify a consumer's need to quickly display images, but don't come close to offering a professional look. In the last year or more, I tried several "pro" systems like SmugMug and PhotoShelter but find them pretty good, but limited in many ways. I recently switched again to Livebooks, and find they offer the most professional looking templates and tools to display your images. I am currently working on getting my site up on livebooks, and they make easy. There are many approaches to getting a web site up and running, but if you're not technical, and you want something more professional than Flickr, then checkout systems that offer templates you can build on; you get the best of both worlds.
Garry
Toronto
Glad you're asking these questions, and yes, it's a good idea to research different products to find one that is right for you from the start. I have a website and a blog and find that they both satisfy my needs. I use SmugMug for my website and even though I haven't had any sales, the feature is there. I sell my prints through exhibits or local galleries, but at least the feature is available on my website. I'm not a computer geek but I have been able to use the features on SmugMug to personalize my website, plus their customer service is the best. And the annual fee is very affordable.
I also write a blog through WordPress and the cost is free. Blogging is a great way to stay in touch with your customers, family and friends. You can use it to post images as well, but I prefer to keep the two separate. When I write a post on my blog, I post it also on my Facebook page which will direct anyone back to my blog. From my blog anyone can click on the link to my website to see my images. I also have a link on my website to my blog.
Keep doing your research and look at different websites and blogs to see what you personally like as far as layouts, looks, etc. I maintain both my website and blog and I feel it represents me and my creative side. I know there are folks out there who have a much more sophisticated website, but these two options work great for me and it's affordable.
Let us know how things work out for you. You can click on any of the links at the bottom of my post here to check out my blog and website to see how they might work for you. Best of luck.
Undoubtedly everyone who has already replied is far more qualified than I, but since my present web host expires at the end of july I had already begun looking round for a more professional replacement. I've gone with Zenfolio. They have several grades of service, so that if you want the basic display option it's quite inexpensive, and then you can upgrade to different levels when (and how) you eventually decide to start selling your images. It's user-friendly and you avoid needing a complete change of web host when you want to upgrade. (My site is still a "work in progress" so I'm not yet sharing the link publicly.)
To answer a few questions, I'm a software developer and have been focusing on Web development in the past 4-5 years, so I'm quite familiar with HTML, CSS, Javascript, databases etc... Which makes me want to find solutions that involve the least amount of having to manually develop the website with these technologies, as the last thing I'd like to do on my free time is more technical work of the same nature as my profession. I will do more research on the tools you mentioned.
I think I have enough to get started. Thank you again for your help and advice, it's all highly appreciated.
Sounds to me that your experience so far already puts you WAY ahead of the curve of the vast majority of us photog types. But I'm guessing it also gives you more insight than the rest of us.... For example, most all the professional sites you see these days, and I'm mostly referring to commercial sites, there is no single site that was developed by one person. In fact there are teams and departments that just deal with one thing, like "social media," or "navigation" or "search" or "the blog," "current events," etc. etc. Doing all that in today's web I believe is MORE than a full time job. And I think you nailed it in terms of not wanting to do your "job" in your free time.
The ONLY reason I still do my own coding is that my site has been built and added to over the years. My first website was eons ago in 1995 (yes, the Internet was already invented by Al Gore by then.)
Start a blog, make use of some sites where all the programming is done for you but gives you options for customizing. If in the end you're not happy, build your own.
Lon
Thanks for your advice. I guess the blog and the website are complimentary. I feel like I need a website in order to organize the photos in a more flexible way than the photo sharing websites which I currently use. I'm not going to expedite this whole process though; I'll take my time before delving in.
Cheers.
It does sound as if you're way ahead of the power curve in web development. I wish I'd known your experience level before I wrote my reply, because I would have couched it differently. No problem, though.
Just food for thought...
If you want to use Asp.Net and SQL Server, Expression Web, in conjunction with Visual Studio will get the job done for you. Use Expression Web for the design, graphics, etc, and use VS for your code behind. If you don't have VS, you can get Visual Web Developer Express for free from MS. I don't know if you're aware of it, but Dreamweaver does not support Asp.Net.
You can still use the tools mentioned above if you want to use PHP and MySQL.
--P
I'm sorry I did not mention my experience before; I was looking for a photographer's approach to building a website. Your feedback is well appreciated.
I'm currently a software engineer tasked with maintaining and enhancing a corporate web site. We use JS, AJAX and JQuery for the client side, ASP.Net and C# for the rest of the business layer and SQL Server for the back end. Visual Studio is adequate for my purposes for HTML and CSS and for debugging ASP.Net and C#. I also like Mozilla's Firebug a lot for use in debugging. I don't have any experience with PHP or MySQL but have heard good things about them from other developers, if you don't want to go the MS route. I've been doing systems, first as a programmer and then as a project manager, for thirty years or so but have only started doing web programming in the last couple of years. So I'm trying to learn the web development technologies too and plan to spend a good part of my upcoming retirement writing web code for my own site.
I'll be interested in hearing what tools you end up using.
pat
Question to Barbara, or users of SmugMug: Do you use any other software like DreamWeaver or is SmugMug sufficient for your needs? I'm trying to find out whether SmugMug has sufficient functionality to build and maintain the website.
Many thanks again in advance.
Joe
You might want to take a look at Web studio 5.0
I used it to put together my web site and it worked pretty well.
They have a trial version you can download and build a practice website.
They have a good tutorial, and search engine for questions.
They will also host your website (I didn't use that)
There are some issues with dispaying issues, but they could probably be remedied by someone more savvy than myself.
Thank you all for your feedback; you've been helpful as usual. I'm still working on the website, adding photos at my pace (government speed). But you'll find the link to the website alongside my NPN info below.