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Website help

S

sj2w1

Active member
I was hoping everyone could recommend some website hosts that you've had experience with. In the past I used Format, which never really worked out; it looked good though. I did all I could with SEO there, but clients most often found me by locating the profile I had on Model Mayhem (deleted a couple years ago). I recently tried Square space and didn't care for it much. The images appeared soft when uploaded and the sizes would would change or be cropped. I never figured out the image size problem in the galleries and the images in the storefront were always cropped. The soft look after uploading was fixable by applying a good amount of sharpening to the uploaded jpg's.
All-in-all, what has worked for all of you?
At the present moment I'm concentrating on art galleries and fine art limited prints. I'm still feeling out portraiture and commercial work.
 
diggles

diggles

Well-known member
Hey Stephen,

My day job includes developing websites. For my photography site, I'm using Wordpress + NextGEN Gallery:

Commercial Photography - Denver, Fort Collins - Diggles Photography

Commercial photographer in Denver Metro focused on business portraits and marketing photography for corporations and industry. Available for travel.
www.digglesphotography.com www.digglesphotography.com

At the moment I'm only using this site for my portfolio. I do have plans to offer prints for sale in the future, just not there yet. I'm not sure if I'll use WooCommerce (a Wordpress plugin) to be the shopping cart engine or if I'll use an interface provided by a printing service like the one Bay Photo Labs has. Whatever I do, the portfolio section will stay as is.

Out of the box, Wordpress has a bunch of quirks in its own right, but most of them can be adjusted to your liking. You just have to work through each one, one at a time– fiddling with them to see what they do.

The ability to customize Wordpress is one of its biggest strengths. There are a lot of things you can do through the backend settings, but many times you'll need to work with a programmer to customize the theme files so they look/work exactly how you want. I work very closely with a developer on most of our website projects to do this.

Wordpress is built for SEO, but simply creating a website full of portfolio images is not going to work. You'll need to add a significant amount of written content and get other sites to link to yours if you want to rank well on Google. Usually this is done through blog posts, or a journal as some people call it.

Yoast is a very popular, and excellent, Wordpress plugin for SEO. They have an expansive archive of SEO related articles on their website to help you get the technical details of SEO correct. Here is a good article on Yoast's site about how to optimize a photography site for Google searches:
yoast.com

Case study: SEO of a photographer's site

If you're a photographer you need a great website. In this case study we look at a photographer's website. Learn how to fix common issues!
yoast.com yoast.com

One of the benefits of creating a Wordpress site is that you will own it and you won't have to pay any commissions to a third party for sales made through your website. I believe sites like Format take a percentage of every sale you make through their platform. One of the downsides is that you'll have to find a proper hosting service for your site and be sure to keep Wordpress and all associated plugins up to date.

Hope that helps!
Warren
 
buildbot

buildbot

Well-known member
Depends heavily on your own needs/capabilities! For example, one of my websites is hosted on a VM I setup at a provider called Digital Ocean, running the ghost blogging software. The other is a static website served through Microsoft Azure.

But based on what you have used before, I would recommend Ghost’s hosted service: https://ghost.org/ Basically, ghost is a much better and faster wordpress (in my opinion).
 
guphotography

guphotography

Well-known member
I've been throught aphotofolio, square space and currently with Adobe Portfolio (free with creative cloud subscription).

First one is expensive but okay for everything except commerce, not sure if things have improved.

Square Space tried to target everyone, hence not great for anything, jack of all trades sort, you get my drift.

I settled on adobe portfolio for its no frill service since it is included in the cs subscription.

Most of my clients come through word of mouth and direct mailer. SEO played little or no part, hence unimportant to me.

I did contemplate the ability to sell prints, but the marketing effort required to drive traffic to the site waaaaaaaay outweights SEO alone, so I did not bother. Instead, I work with small publishers and architectural associations for anything printed, in the hope it would lead to print collectors eventually. Again, huge amount of efforts needed to fruition.

I recently found an interested platform cargo.site, very artistic but mind boggling to get the site done right, the ecommerce seems seamlessly integrated, not the cheapest option but reasonable.

If I were to redevelope my site again, I would be keen to host it with cargo, you can make it look bespoke enough to impress any discerning clients.

Too many drag and drop platforms out there, more or less the same, so I am keen to learn if anything new myself.
 
diggles

diggles

Well-known member
nameBrandon

nameBrandon

Well-known member
I’m rather technical, though not in the web dev space, but I’ve run a few Wordpress sites in my time. I was also using Format when I decided to redesign / freshen up the website. I started digging back into a few themes I’d used in the past for WP, and it honestly became such a headache I started looking elsewhere. I also tried Squarespace and found it really annoying.

I tried a few more things, and then finally decided to give Wix a shot. I had turned my nose up at Wix for a while as a Geocities/Angelfire equivalent (dating myself with that reference…) but was really, really impressed when I finally spent some time with it. I had everything I wanted built out and in the style I had wanted within a couple of days. It was really, really easy.

Now my needs may not line up with yours, but if you’re looking for a decent portfolio site, some basic gallery / client capabilities, it‘s worth taking a look at.

My site, for reference.. http://robert-brandon.com
 
rdeloe

rdeloe

Well-known member
I keep it simple. SmugMug works well for me. The technical support via email is superb. It's quite customizable, so it doesn't have to look like everyone else's.
www.robdeloephotography.com

Rob de Loe

Powered by SmugMug
www.robdeloephotography.com www.robdeloephotography.com
 
S

sj2w1

Active member
Thank you to all for taking the time to respond, it's much appreciated. I've been looking into each suggestion and I'm weighing my options. It will come down to ease of use setting up, updating, and an effective storefront.
 
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