Photo Web Host - suggestions?

[Jack Brady]

Greetings,

Over the 8 months, I've managed to drum scan and "tune" in CS2 about 50 of the 4x5 and 2 1/4 images I've shot over the years.

I would like to establish a web site to display my work and offer images for sale.

I do not want to get into a lot of programming to set up the site - ideally point and click set up.

I would appreciate lessons learned from this group, suggestions for excellent Hosts firms to use, etc.

Looking forward to your suggestions, and Thanks in advance,
Jack

[John Hoenstine]

I use www.startlogic.com (http://www.startlogic.com) they have lots of templates, gallery and shopping carts. You could probably build a site without too much programing.
Good luck

[Henry Ambrose]

I like sitemason (http://www.sitemason.com"target="_blank)

Last I talked with them they were gonna have a special template just for photographers.
They are great people to deal with. Tell them I sent you.

[robc]

just google "digital asset management" and/or "image asset management" and take your pick.

just be sure that your host provides php/mysql or asp/msyql/sql server as defined by the requirements of the software package you choose. Also make sure the host you choose gives you plenty of web site bandwidth as a busy image site can use lots of GB per month.

[Mark Woods]

I use iMac with the iWeb program that's bundled with the iLife group. I really like it and the price is very reasonable -- if you have a Mac. ;-) Take a look at http://www.markwoods.com/

MW

[Scott Knowles]

One consideration is if you want/have your own domain name. There are many hosts (ISP's) for individuals and/or small business(es) but you're sharing their domain name in your URL and e-mail addresses. If you want your own domain name, you have to register it with an ISP, usually for a small fee for the work and annual fee, and hosting is the cost to consider. It depends on the size of the account and number of services, from Web design, secured payment, e-mail accounts, updating, etc. Some larger ISP's are fairly affordable and some smaller ones are usually a little more. ISP's advertise their rates. Good luck.

[Ted Harris]

Jack, I host three different websites on Dream Host (www.dreamhost.com) they are lower profile than some of the other industry leaders but offer solid services at excellent prices. If you want to buiild a site absolutely painlesslywithout tying it into one ISP or another take a look at Contricute 3 from Maxromedia, you can get a full free one month download.

More coming offlist.

[Mike Cockerham]

Check out page (http:/www.bluehost.com) Bluehost.com. $8 a month with plenty of extras.

[Hugh Sakols]

I use A Small Orange www.asmallorange.com and have a lifetime hosting for $150.00. Otherwise it is $30 a year. It is easy to manage using their cpanal and fantastico scripts. Fantastico allow one to do things like load a discussion forum or creat a guestbook. I created my site using Dreamweaver MX and iview media pro.

www.yosemitecollection.com

[Frank Petronio]

If you have no experience, start with Flickr. Seriously. It will teach you a lot and let you make mistakes and experiments cheaply and without investing too much a design you will hate a week later.

Then hire a good web designer who understands clean design, usability, and standards-based code. This is very important as most designers and web geeks are not compentent in these areas, sad to say.

Avoid Flash, WYSIWYG web programs, and canned templates.

My favorite photo site is http://www.slower.net, not so much for the photography as much as how he chooses to display his photos and the design and programming that is incorporated into the site. It is -- to me at least - simply the very best photographer's website online today.

I used to design and build websites, starting with DuPont's first one in 1995. I worked as a dot.com creative director, did several Fortune 500 sites, etc. But I haven't kept up with the skillset required to code properly, and I rather not do things half-a$$. Now I work with http://lumino.us to write code, help me with the geeky stuff, and to help with the navigation and design. So rather than bury yourself in geekdom -- and shoveling another mediocre photography website upon the world -- do everyone a favor and hire a pro (even if they are in Russia or Brooklyn or Timbuktu).

Which isn't that expensive... a couple grand and you'll have a site that will be 1. very easy to modify and update, so it never becomes stale; 2. shows up on search engines much better than other photographer's sites because of the standards based code; and 3. is a pleasure for visitors.

I think investing $2500 or so is money well spent that will easily be recouped in increased sales by having a better site than 99% of your competition.

Think of how many awful photography websites you've seen compared to the good ones...

As for hosting, it's a commodity and many of the places above are simply reselling hosting several times over. Just go with whomever your favorite geek is already using. $6 a month for a basic site is around the going rate.

Good Luck!

[Michael Hewson]

I found "Dreamweaver" easy to use (bit like a word processor really) - then hosted the web site I built locally using the ISP that provides me my internet/email service - part of the deal is a certain web space free.

[Marko]

What Frank said.

Flash, Dreamweaver et al are all just tools. Capable and complex tools to be sure, but they will not construct your site no more than Photoshop will create your graphics - it's what a designer/web architect will do. But then again, really competent ones can do that using nothing more than a text editor.

Web design and photography have a lot in common - everybody can "do" that, but only professionals can do either professionally. And guess what, no matter what Uncle Ernie says, you can always tell his snapshots from professional photography. Well, it's the same with web design, just substitute Uncle Ernie with your neighbour's "kid with Front Page".

If you think $2,000-3,000 is expensive, you can always commission a site for $500-$600. Just remember, if you do that, you will end up with just that - a $500 site representing you and your worth.

Regards,

[Witold Grabiec]

Before you decide on a hosting provider, check out webhostingtalk.com. Probably the only place with reliable input on hosters actually do and offer (bluehost for example has been trouble for many). It's a forum where actual users tell you how things are going. Many hosters offer huge space/bandwidth, but oversell heavilly which slows their servers and creates a load of other problems too. It's more reliable to sign up for a "reseller" account. This will give you not only better performance (almost guaranteed), but also the ability to set up many (or even unlimited) domains if you choose or need. It's all done in your control panel, which are almsot as easy to use as point-and-click affairs. What this means is that you can get together with someone else (to share the cost) and essentially share an account while running completely seperate web sites (in a reseller account you slice and cut the allocated space as you choose).

One of the most trusted hosters appears to be hostgator.com. Reseller account with 5Gb of space runs for $25 a month. While this pales against a 15Gb for $7, the truth is quite opposite. Again, reading the webhostingtalk.com will tell you some amazing stories on what to expect.

[Witold Grabiec]

Further, assuming you intend to be fund efficient, you should not be paying more than $10 a year for your domain. In general you should not have your site host as your domain registrar (or a middle man). I use gkg.net for domain registration (about $8/year) and have not looked at it for a couple of years. I'm sure there is planty of others doing just as well. Just make sure YOU remain the owner of the domain.

Domain name is a key so it'd be time to check out available names and register. You can park your domain before you get a host.

[robc]

sorry to be negative about it but you should also consider this:

Photography is one one of the biggest subjects on the net after anything computer related. For your intended site to be visible in search engines that means you are competing with the big boys. To be on page one of google for any one of thousands of search phrases which are photo or art related you will be competing with thousands of other web pages. If you ain't on page one for any one of those possible phrases then getting sufficient hits to make many sales is not going to happen in a big way. Achieving page one is very very difficult and for $2000 or $3000 you won't get that.

There thousands of web designers out there who are willing to re-invent the wheel for you with their "super" design skills. Trouble is, they don't have a clue about achieving high search engine position. So when they tell you its going to cost $2000 or $3000 tell them that at that price it must include guaranteed page one position in google for ten different search phrases and see what they say. I can can guarantee you that you will then get stream of effluent from them. You might then want to consider why you would be paying $3000 for something which very few people are ever likely to see unless you point them there by spending more money on other forms of web site promotion.

You might want to consider some free software such as a blog with a photoblog plugin and template. Have a look at www.wordpress.org. There are others which are just as good. They may not have the best graphics design but web site success is not about graphics design, its about page hits. You know that if you show an image to 100 people you will get a 100 different opinions. Same is true for web page design so spending lots on a graphic design won't pay. Spending lots on getting web page hits will.

[Witold Grabiec]

Page one in Goole for general photographic phrases? Rather unrealistic at any price, not to mention unneccessary. If your name is searched for, it will end up close to page one relatively quickly with rather basic search engine submissions (and in a few months without anything).

[robc]

"If your name is searched for, it will end up close to page one relatively quickly"

obviously thats true unless you happen to be called "smith", but that only works if people already know who you are. What if they've never heard of you and do a search on "photo art" or "black and white photography", then your stuffed unless you have someone who really knows what they are doing writing your site. That costs big bucks...

try it, type in photo art to google and you'll get ten links back out of 450 million. You might narrow that down by puting photo art inside quotes and get 10 out of 2.8 million but that still means tha 2.8 million pages have not been optimised to appear on page 1 for that search phrase. In my book thats not very good odds when looking for a web designer...

I should add again that photography is a worst case example for this simply because it is such a popular subject. Tough I know but thats just how the web works, there can only be a few on page one and getting there takes a lot more than a bit of fancy web design...

[Frank Petronio]

If it were simply about showing up higher in search engines then you'd be right, nothing else matters. But merely getting rankings is hardly enough -- you need to attract quality people who are impressed by your work and may purchase prints or hire you. The idea behind having a simple, attractive design with easy clear navigation, built with standards-based best practice techniques, is to remove the barriers that separate your website from your audience. You need to make it easy for people.

It's not at all about being fancy. In fact, being less fancy is harder to do.

A couple of years ago I convinced a company to toss out $75,000 of bad code in order to build a better - simpler - website. I suggest it works at this level as well.

[robc]

I don't disagree with you Frank, but getting hits comes first and if the images are good enough they will sell themselves. The Graphic design comes last in my book but there is no doubt it adds to marketing but without the first two its useless IMO.

getting back to the original question, here is a link to a gallery software suite which I have no personal experience of but which if I were in the market for one then I would look at very closely.

www.lightboxphoto.com/ (http://www.lightboxphoto.com/)

at $600 for the pro version I think it represents very good value and it almost click and go as the original question asked for. Check the demos and also look at the customise optimise options to see what people have done with it. It has a simple and effective layout.

What do you think Frank? Could you do that for $600?

[Frank Petronio]

Nah, I don't want to get outta bed for $600 ;-)

And I'm certainly not looking to sell anything here. Just my two cents from doing web photo galleries for eleven years now. I still think the best stuff is done by hand, with a text editor and lots of testing.

For $600 it's a good product. I was looking at this standards-based photo gallery software myself:

http://www.stopdesign.com/templates/photos/

Which is $25 shareware and perhaps the better solution incorporating Moveable Type. Stop Design is one of the better web design places.

Maybe spend $25 on shareware and give $575 to a local geek to set it up properly?

As for search engine results, I doubt you can knock Photo.net off. But you might be able to do pretty well when someone searches for something more specific, like "black, white, Glacier Bay" or that sort of thing.

I get a lot of hits from Google "Images" not text because I use good text descriptors and names for my images (most of the time). That's often overlooked in all of this.

[Frank Petronio]

And to be a little less geeky...

(In general, there are always exceptions)

If you do your website in Flash, or use a lot of Java Script, etc. it makes it harder for the search engines to "see" the content.

If your site using HTML or XTML text, with tags on the images, it makes it easy for search engines to see it.

Do your text as graphics (gifs and jpgs) makes it impossible to search.

Other sites linking to yours - people going to your site - raises its search engine results.

What search engines are looking for is relevancy, not keywords. So writing - and posting - is good. That's why blogs do better than static sites in general.

[robc]

you forgot to say that search engines are oblivious to graphic design ;-)

I agree on the text and blogs but real sucess comes when the relevancy is targetted at the search phrases that are being used in the real world. You have to pay google for that information which is why google is worth billions...

[Frank Petronio]

Rob, if you look at my site, or Lumino.us, or Stop Design, or slower.net you'll see that the "graphic design" is quite restrained and minimal. They certainly are designed, but the design gets out of the way and lets the content be the most important element.

Most "graphic designers" will try to dominate their sites with overt design, which I think is the wrong choice. That's why ad agencies and graphic design studios are often the worst place to go for a good website design!

So maybe we agree and I certainly am not trying to pick a fight. But I think it takes a better designer to present the content as strongly as possible.

(I actually have written about this topic quite a bit at my other site, http://www.cleanpage.com. Scroll down a couple of entries for the web philosophy post.)

[robc]

I don't disagree with you frank and you have seen my site which is quite simple in its apparent design. The point I have been trying to make is that graphic design is not the b all and end all of a web site and that it has all been done before. There are plenty of well designed gallery products out there for a lot less than $3000. Why pay $3000 for a new version of the wheel which you could buy for $600 and for which you will get a lot more tried and tested functionality than a bespoke design for $3000 will ever give you.

The companies selling these products make their money on the volume of sales. Bespoke design makes it money on a one off sale. It will therefore always cost more for bespoke design and in the world of web site design it is frequently not better than an off the shelf product.

Far better to spend $600 on a good off the shelf product which provides all the funtionality you may need and to spend the other $2400 on getting an expert to do the indexing which will pay for itself if your images are marketable.

[Marko]

Stop Design is one of the better web design places.

Frank, you sure know how to deliver an understatement! LOL.

Douglas Bowman is one of the relatively few varsity guys in our trade. One of the guys (and gals) who invent new things and set trends.

I know you know, I'm saying this for the benefit of others reading this thread. Want to know how something's done and done right? Look at Stopdesign (Doug) or A List Apart (Zeldman) or Meyerweb (Meyer). There are others, of course, but these guys are the first that come to mind when you mention contemporary web design.

Regards,

[Marko]

Rob,

With all due respect to your photography and without a desire to continue the argument we've had before, I think you confuse web mastering, graphic design and web architecture.

Yes, it used to be the "geek downstairs" who did all those things back in 1996 or 97, but things have changed until then.

you forgot to say that search engines are oblivious to graphic design ;-)

That's exactly what Frank was saying. That search engines cannot see JavaScript, Flash and images. Pages that fare the best with search engines are those that use semantically correct and structurally sound (X)HTML, that use JavaScript, Flash and even images very sparingly. And above all, the pages which render correctly in any user agent (doesn't even have to be a browser!), because no matter how high they rank in the search results, they will ultimately be worthless if they don't function correctly or even don't render at all in the visitor's browser.

If those packages could really do all that and better than real, experienced web designer, then there would be no web designers left today, because none would be needed. Ditto for digital cameras and professional photographers.

Yes, the peanut gallery is now even less likely to hire a professional in either field because "they can do it themselves for a fraction of the price" using this package/camera that "can do all that and more for only a couple of $hundred", but the serious clients will always hire a pro.

[robc]

so Marko what do you reckon to Ajax?

[robc]

Oh and Marko I forgot to ask, could you provide a bespoke website with the functionality of www.lightboxphoto.com for $3000 and if not how much would you think would be a fair charge for something similar?

[Marko]

so Marko what do you reckon to Ajax?

Rob, the real question is what do you reckon of it?

Oh and Marko I forgot to ask, could you provide a bespoke website with the functionality of www.lightboxphoto.com

I presume you are talking about lightbox the website, not lightbox the software, when you mention "the bespoke website", right?

Suffice it to say, it would validate for standards and accessibility compliance, it would work on all platforms, in all browsers and other user agents, right out of the box.

Safari inlcuded. ;)

Regards,

[robc]

I didn't think for one moment that I'd get a straight answer. Thread is now pointless. bye bye

[Frank Petronio]

??? Rob, Marko is giving you straight advice.

Just use Lightbox. People get the websites they deserve.

[Doug Dolde]

Another option is www.fluidgalleries.com (http://www.fluidgalleries.com)

Looks pretty sleek and sexy. The drawback is that many other people may use it so your's won't be that unique.

I am on my 4th redesign of my website. It's all done with Adobe GoLive and is my own design. (note the copyright :)

www.painted-with-light.com (http://www.painted-with-light.com)

[Wayne Crider]

I have looked at quite a few different photographers sites on the web and chosen a couple that i like the layout on. Next step, when I'm ready, is to email them as to who designed the site. Most people are pretty helpful with information.

As concerns DIY programs, you'll get confused with the different responses and the time it takes to shift thru the different ones. Some hosting companies give free software away to help, you might try that if getting a domain name, or you can try the simple formats thru your service provider to start with. Mac has their own limited time free site, and beyond that are others which give different formats, but with flexability issues. Dreamweaver is considered the software to use tho; Well along with Photoshop and maybe others in combination. If you desire to have full control in designing and maintaining the site, and have to time to do so, you can start at the bottom and try this n' that till you find what you like, or hand code everything, or get a top name program like Dreamweaver or Aperture to help. I've tried two or three and they work to varying degree's. I've a PC software program that's pretty decent and you can have it for free if you want to try it, just post me. The thought of getting someone to do it for you tho will allow you to concentrate on your expertise. I find that most people are just better at internet design then I.

[Kirk Gittings]

I have been very happy with SiteWelder. It can be very straightforward or highly adaptable.

my site www.gittingsphoto.com (http://www.gittingsphoto.com)

www.sitewelder.com/ (http://www.sitewelder.com/)

[Jack Brady]

Thanks to all of you for your input - much to digest from what has been suggested.
I appreciate it and look forward to getting my web site up over the next couple of months.
Jack