Photo website ?

Forde-fotos

Hi,
I am just wondering what is the best way of setting up a photo website, one that will have my own domain name. Are there ready built sites available to purchase anywhere ?
I have got quotations for custom built sites but they are a bit to expensive. I would like something simple and if possible a similar format to a smugmug gallery.
Thanks for looking.

jebuz

Hi Forde-fotos,

It really doesn't have to be expensive to set a photography website, there is plenty of information and free resources out there on the web that will have you up and away for less than you would imagine.

You can purchase a .com domain for $5 or $6, sorted, as for hosting space, it depends on what package you choose but could cost around €30-€40 a year, check out the hosting forum in the tech section.

For the site, there are plenty of free professional website templates which have built in CMS's (content management system), I would recommend Wordpress or Joomla. You may need a bit of technical knowledge to get these runnning, but once its live its quite easy to maintain and more importantly reliable. There are literally thousands of user developed plugins for wordpress and a huge support network, so I would imagine there are plenty of nifty plugins you could use for an image gallery, personally I haven't looked into that yet.

I have been working quite a bit with Wordpress recently, and am also developing a custom website from scratch for my own photography and music, so if you need any advice or help just ask.

Out of curiosity, how much were you quoted for a custom built site?

stcstc

have a look at

clickpic

and

photoium

they offer sites hosting and domain etc designed for photographers

Forde-fotos

I was quoted 2000 without a shop or 4000 with a shop so that is an outrageous price in my eyes.

Cameraman

Have a look at Zenfolio.

I think you can use your own URL with the Pro version ($100 p.a.)

You can sell photos with prices in €uro and either self-fulfill or use Photobox.

pullandbang

Forde-fotos wrote: »

I was quoted 2000 without a shop

That's scandalous.
I bought a sofware package for €40 approx and have set up four sites - and I know next to nothing about computers. Admittedly thay don have image galleries, but one of them has clickable thumbnails whereby the full size image opens on clicking. From what I remember when doing them, I could just as easily set up a gallery. Updating them later is a piece of pi55.

kgpixels

Have used Clikpic before for a photo site and found it good. They have different price bands depending on how many photo's you want to upload and overall they are reasonable.

Doing it yourself might not be as hard you think. For example there are tons of customisable flash viewers available like Simpleviewer, were all you have to do is resize your photos put them in a folder and then update a *.xml file!

willows

gallery2 is a good package with opensource ecommerce plugins available.

Fenster

I did all of mine (click below) with Wordpress and boy can't you tell?

gary82

I've a week free between jobs at the end of the month if you'd like one done up. I'd generally charge €600'ish for a gallery site that you'd have easy access to change images and text. That's not including a shop but could sort that too if you were interested. PM if you're interested.

Stupid_Private

It's all well and good to start saying €2,000 is a lot when you break down the costs into €10 for domain name €40 for hosting, a token amount for a crap template and so on.

If you think you can do it better and cheaper than a professional designer then by all means go for it. But if you are going to a professional, who has trained in website design, done countless sites, then don't be surprised to see a quote in the region of three or four thousand. This is your online presence and first impressions count when people visit your website. At the end of the day you get what you pay for - if you're forking out three grand on a brochure site then you should expect a damn good one. If you're only willing to pay a couple of hundred euro expect a functional site but nothing ground breaking or unique.

I am not a website designer but have worked alongside many in my time.

sineadw

I'd have to agree - I start at about 1500 for a commercial site. Its exactly the same as wedding photography - you can do it cheaply, but unless you're very lucky it'll show.

If you're going down the self build route you can get a lot of free stuff online I'd highly recommend Joomla - very easy to work with and LOTS of online help out there. Lots of different gallery and shop plug-ins too

If you need a hand give me a shout.. And gis a look when you're done!

AnCatDubh

Forde-fotos wrote: »

I was quoted 2000 without a shop or 4000 with a shop so that is an outrageous price in my eyes.

hmmnnnnnnn... don't be too outraged. In my job, i just paid the 4k mark for a copy of an existing site to incorporate new graphics and a fresh style, a new site build, incorporating accessibility, new taxonomy, blah-de-blah-de-blah,...... But was a basic copy of an existing custom template. And that didn't even have an online shop facility. That particular job demanded the work and high levels of craftsmanship. People that are professional at this kind of work are worth every cent they charge if they are good.

To be fair and add balance if you have next to zero of a budget - you can still do it - my work situation is hardly what I as an individual might consider paying; my personal web presence hasn't 4k of a budget available to it, not 2k, nor €200 tbh.

So, to do it cheaply, I've set up a tumblr blog for my images - I can either get them to host a sized version of an image, or point them at pix.ie or flickr, etc.... This all costs zero. You are stuck with a standard template to begin with but if prepared to delve into css you can modify it yourself or you could spend a little on someone doing this for you. I haven't modified mine as yet.

Anyway for cheap skates sake lets assume you find a template that you are ok with - cost = zero. That gets you a http://yourname.tumblr.com.

Next lets assume you want buy a domain to be posh, and be www.yourname.com. Unfortunately, I haven't found out how to reliably do this for free so you'll have to spend about $10 - what's that €7 or €8. Some places will do it for free but will eventually hijack your traffic stream if you don't abide by their terms. I'd pay the couple of euros to be honest.

Hint - register your domain name through google apps - they front godaddy.com for domain stuff - and you'll have a google apps standard edition (50 user) managing your new email domain including spam filtering / anti virus checking and giving you the google docs, chat, sites, etc... should you want to use it - this again for us cheap skates is all for free.

Then point your domain at the tumblr service (instructions on tumblr site) but basically you log into the godaddy control panel using the google apps user instructions, and create an A record for your www domain, and point it to the tumblr ip which it gives on the site. You need to get rid of the google assigned C Name record - but thats just a matter of hitting delete in the control panel. Sounds a bit complicated but its a snip really. In tumblr, customise your blog and in the info panel, tell it you are using a customised domain name and to expect traffic from www.yourname.com.

Tada..... Now you have a fully functional web presence - admitedly blog based for about €7/€8 per year (to include domain registration). No shopping cart included obviously but hey - for €7/€8 it sure aint bad. You could probably do something with pay pal for your shopping orders and that wouldn't cost anything either except a % of the sale.

Don't forget to set up your google analytics - again for free, to give you traffic analysis. Or use the great statcounter.com - again their free account is cool - they're Irish too IIRC.

I've done the above with a couple of sites so it works perfectly. I also done (through my job) a couple of sites which are of the €4k variety and they work perfectly too

Zero or 4k - it all depends on what you want really.

Forde-fotos

Cheers guys, some great information there, but I think I am going to go with a Smugmug gallery and link it up with my own Domain name.
Thanks for your help.

AnCatDubh

I've had a query about some of the technical detail of combining the tumblr settings and the domain settings which I had posted above to yield a www.yourdomain.com

The following is a step by step how-to which I post here for anyone else that may be interested. Obviously this is posted in good faith and if you make a complete muck up of it, then it will ultimately be your own look out. Having said that, these are step by step so follow them and you should be sorted.

In Google Apps, having registered your domain using the godaddy service it offers; follow;

Domain Settings
Domain Names
Advanced DNS settings

<Note the Sign-in name, Password and PIN>

Sign in to DNS console
Enter Customer # (Sign-in name) and Password on the Godaddy Domain Control Center

After the login; Click the link to yourdomain under the domains.

Under Total DNS, Click the link to Total DNS Control

Under the CNAME section click the delete ( 'X' icon ) opposite the google provided www host row. This will then show as pending and will eventually go without further interaction

Then under the A (Host) section
Click the Add New A Record (right hand side of the section).


Enter the 'Host Name' = www (or other subdomain that you may wish to create such as blog or myphotos).

Under 'Points to Ip Address', enter the Tumblr ip which is 72.32.231.8

Leave TTL as 1 Hour and click Ok.

You should get a "New record successfully created" message. Ok this.

Again, this will show as 'pending setup' - this will sort itself out in due course.


At this stage you have created a www.yourdomain.com
and pointed it to the Tumblr service but the tumblr service doesn't know how to handle the forwarded traffic.

Back in Tumblr;

Login to your tumblr account and go to the dashboard.
Click the 'customise' link
Now click 'Info'
Click the 'use a custom domain name' check box

Enter your domain name which you setup in the godaddy panel
for example www.yourdomain.com


The click 'save changes' top right of screen.

You can also click test your domain to ensure that all is ok by following the "Test you domain" link.


Should be all done. Tumblr will also now redirect any traffic from your username.tumblr.com account to your www.yourdomain.com

Hope that helps.

houseoffun14

You could contact Adam Williams at www.awx2d.com , he did a recent overhaul and redesign of my website which you can see at http://www.photoimagery.net

projectmayhem

Register your domain, get some hosting, install wordpress, download a photo-based theme. Done deal.

If you use blacknight they can install wordpress for you (though it's not hard). They even have a self-install e-commerce package if you want to set up a shop to sell prints through

Forde-fotos

Thanks for all the help guys.

Here is the finished site :

www.fordefotos.com

I am very pleased with it and it didnt cost me anywhere near the 2000 euro mark. :D:D

Cabaal

Forde-fotos wrote: »

Thanks for all the help guys.

Here is the finished site :

www.fordefotos.com

I am very pleased with it and it didnt cost me anywhere near the 2000 euro mark. :D:D

Give you a simple suggestion, you've paid for a domain so use your domain properly...drop the hotmail address it looks unprofessional as hell.

You should be using something like info@fordefotos.com instead

Anouilh

You might find the sites listed in Blogcatalog useful for ideas:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/topic/awesome+photo+sites/

Chorcai

http://www.metamorphozis.com/shop/photography.php

http://www.free-website-template.net/templates-by-themes.php?n=40

^^ Some are slightly cheaper.

nilhg

The site itself looks well, just two small points. Calendar is spelt wrongly which looks unprofessional and the watermarking is really off putting to the point of putting me off looking at more than a few shots....

Forde-fotos

Thanks for the comments, the watermark will be staying that way.