LOL I've heard people tell me they want to make their sites slower and more difficult so that people "take their time" and think.... which is fine if you want them to think bad things.
LOL I've heard people tell me they want to make their sites slower and more difficult so that people "take their time" and think.... which is fine if you want them to think bad things.
My web site is specifically for marketing. My resellers use it to sell to their customers and I use it to sell to my own customers. Most of my online sales have happened after meeting the customer at an art show or gallery show and are considered follow-up sales from the show. Since I've stopped doing shows for a while, most of my sales are coming from my resellers.
Just yesterday, I got an order from a customer in Massachussetts who had just visited friends in Flagstaff, AZ. After returning home, she googled some keywords, found my site and ordered an 11x14 B&W print of the San Francisco Peaks. Granted, sales from out of the blue like that only happen a few times a year, but it's nice when it does.
My site was designed by a webdesigner using my design goals. It uses the Photo Gallery/Lightbox/Shopping Cart engine from Stockbox Photo with the rest of the site designed around that. Contact info for both is available on my site.
I paid the web designer about $2500 for his work (about half traded in prints) and $700 to license the use of Stockbox Photo. This was my second wbsite since I started my business in 2001. This one went live in 2009 and took about three months to build start to finish (the designer had to learn how to work with the Stockbox software, too).
Yes, real benefits! I couldn't conduct business without it as it provides each new customer with a feeling that I'm for real. My website stats show steady daily visits (for more than one minute) of about 30-50 per day. Not great numbers, but enough to keep me going.
Hope that helped.
Jim Cole
Flagstaff, AZ
I go with the Apple mobile me offering just so a few friends can have a look. Also, I can put photographs there that are a bit beyond what the newspaper and newspaper site would allow.
In the past I did try to see it as a marketing tool, now it's just to show off a little to a few friends who say they're interested in what I do.
I don't even parse out the link/domain name.
http://web.me.com/jflavell1/johnflav...ures_Home.html
"I meant what I said, not what you heard"--Jflavell
I manage my images in Lightroom (processing is in Photoshop) and use the TurningGate plugins to build the WWW site. You configure it within Lightroom. Since it is built on the fly from the files you select in Lightroom, any subsequent edits will be included the next time you republish the site. I use Dreamweaver to post the files after i save them to a local disk with Lightroom:
http://www.epr-art.com/
You can generate a PayPal cart or a couple of other ecommerce system. I use this a way to get my images before the public and run my print business.
Ed Richards
http://www.epr-art.com
Thanks for all the info. I'm still Leary regarding websites. I guess it falls in to these categories.
1. marketing.
2. Sharing work with friends and family and the rest of the world wide web.
3. Blogging (I read some and people love to get their point across.)
and
4. all of the above.
I wonder if there is a simpler way of doing the 2nd one with less of the other two?
yeah it's called Flickr
Buy Hosting and make one with several free tools. Wordpress Is the dominate tool these days, Also you can use Lightroom to build portfolios and export them for the web
i developed mine from scratch... the current site is in Flash, but I'm in the middle of learning how to build it from HTTP5 (seeing as how I work for Apple, and I can't currently see my site on any of my devices..
http://www.jcollum.com
http://www.collumphotography.com is another entrance to the same site (different entry image though)
jim
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