Photo blog- good url important?

dinneenp

Hi,

1.do you think a catchy url is important? or not seeing as most people would visiti your site if they arleady know the name (you told them) or through links etc?
Mine is pacork.wordpress.com. There's a good .ie domain I thought of but wondering if it's worth paying €40 + each year for it. (don't want to share it in case someone takes it...)

some other questions-
what do you do to attract traffic, promote your site?
do you vary pic dimensions or try to keep them all the same?
what should max size be?
cheers,
pa.

sNarah

The name really doesn't matter as much when the page is interesting and appeals to the Public.

However, Wordpress has a certain "hobbyiest" cliché appeal, so if your purpose leisure/personal use, than stick with the wordpress. People will land on that link just as easy as a "proper" website in regards to generating traffic.
So, if you wish to - now or at a certain point in the future - sell the pictures or come accross "professional", a wordpress yolk is just not good enough and certainly lacks professionalism. (I find).

So if you want to come accros more "seriously" and "professional", it's a great idea to already have your website up and running before you plan to use it. That way you can built up portfolio, generate comments and have an overall better looking and busier site by the time you 'need' it.


In regards to generating traffic:
- Google optimalisation
- Where ever you post your images - link and the website in the comment
- Link to page to other photography related blogs/websites of your peers (i.e. Boardies, Pix, ...)
- Keep everthing up to date. There is nothing worse than an outdated photography website with no recent posts.
You can keep the wordpress as a seperate unit at that stage, even link it to the website, and make a clear statement of what you - as a photographer - consider to be your professional work and what you do for fun.


And finally:
In gerenal sticking to one format of photo sizes is a good plan. It's tidy. And consistent.

However, that said:
Yes, you most certainly can vary photo sizes if they serve the purpose.
Depending on what you are showing, consistency might be more important but it is most certainly not a general rule. It's more so a matter of feeling what suits the image and the content.

*eadaoin

I think that a good name is important, if you think about it it's the first piece of your site that everyone will notice and you may want to make a good first impression with it.

It's also handy to have a name that's easy for people to remember. The Pacork name might make sense to you, but if you try to think from the point of view of a reader/viewer of your blog do you think it is something that would stick in their minds and help them to find you again?

You might want to consider using your full name in order to really impress yourself in people's minds and help them to remember your name and connect it to your site and work.

My blog is called City of Blackbirds and I find that people use the term to google and find the blog several times a week, so I would tend to think that this means people have remembered the name and it's doing a decent job

In terms of traffic, I found that as I became more involved in the blogging community that traffic naturally started to flow my way. There are a lot of blogs that I love to visit and am inspired by, and by getting to know other bloggers they would return visits to my blog and add me to their blogrolls if they liked what they saw. So taking part in the community can be invaluable in bringing readers your way, and it's also a great way to meet other photographers and people you will learn from.

In saying that it's a bad idea to use the community purely to bring traffic to your own site, I think usually people can sense what you're doing and don't take too kindly to it!

The points that sNarah made about generating traffic are all very valid especially with regard to keeping things up to date. It's also important to have a blog that looks good and is consistent. A badly laid out blog, horrible colours, an unfinished look or dodgy graphics always put me off staying on a site, photoblogs are visual things afterall so it's important that they are visually pleasing. I find that in my journey across the bologsphere the places that I visit again and again are always professional looking and very pleasing to the eye, they are spaces that are easy to use and easy to look at!

With photoblogs in particular I think it's good to keep the images a consistent size, it keeps things looking coherent and tidy. I also find that personally I am put off by photoblogs that have images that are too large as on my smaller laptop screen I often don't see the whole thing. And some sites with lots of large photos on a single page tend to be slow to load, and not being a very patient person I won't linger there too long if it's too slow!

dinneenp

(maybe should be posted in some tech forum instead of here...)
I was told to contact an approved registrar.

Anyone know which is cheapest, best value, best?
Is there any difference between them?

cheers,
Pa.

PopeBuckfastXVI

Do you need a .ie? .com is much cheaper (unless you're incorporating ie onto the end to make a word like pix.ie). I'm registered with fasthosts in the uk.

sNarah

We had a little session about this yesterday with our cam club people, DarrenG recommended using Blacknight - they are Irish and you can pick any .ie/.com./.org etc.

ingram08kenny

A good url is work half done. My site is also a type of photo blog. Buspictures.net

eightyfish

Can't help with any advice, but I love the colour of money photo.

mehfesto

I guess it depends - if you need to be remembered (i.e. if you have one off meetings with people) it doesn't hurt to have a easily remembered one. I get a good few hits after being asked at gigs what my 'site is.

...I see someone has jumped on my successful bandwagon! :P

But I'd imagine wedding photographers/portrait photographers should lead with their name - makes it easier to find in other places, other than online - like in the Yellow Pages, etc.

AnCatDubh

Two companies involved in the web area separately told me recently for business purposes to avoid any of the Irish hosting companies (they had looked at them all) for a simple reason that Irish Hosting companies can't offer a 24x7 SLA which would be appropriate to the needs of an Irish business. (on the basis of 'who do you ring at 4:30 on a Sunday morning' type of thing). This mightn't be an issue for you if its a hobby website thing but is if you are selling stuff on it.

When one company mentioned it, i thought it was just an individuals personal preference, but when the second one mentioned the very same point (and its highly unlikely that these two people ever talk), I thought there must be something behind it. Both of them also recommended rackspace in the uk on the basis of their exceedingly good customer service and support (apparently rackspace are fanatical about their customer support in their slogans and this holds true).

My personal usage is Blacknight, and i've found them fine. That being said, would I actually know that there were outages to a service other than their blog updates telling us that they've just fixed a widget in the shared linux cluster or whatever, and as yet i've figured everything out that I need to know to have my site running so thus far I have never contacted them for support so can't comment on that.

Another point on what domain to use - beware of vanity naming if you are looking for a cheaper domain as I found out after the event (unfortunately) that google will target traffic based on domain identification - .ie gets a priority with Irish searches, .co.uk gets priority with Uk searches, and so forth. This won't matter if you don't expect people to casually drop via search to find and view your site.

pullandbang

I'm new the the whole photo blog scene (though I do run a few other websites) and when I decided to set up my blog I had the name "All Seeing" in my head. I was on Blacknight to register the .com when they threw up other options including .me. That was it so, I took allseeing.me for my blog 'cos I thought is was cool. (My opinion of course). It was only a fiver from Blacknight so it's not going to break the bank.

So yes, I do think the name is important but the content is more important.

On the other hand, if I was setting up a commercial photography website, I think I'd got for a .ie domain and use either my name or a proper business name.

TinyExplosions

If it's for business use I would go for .com or .ie (or both)... an ie domain is good, as it imprints that you are in Ireland, but many people automatically think of .com so it's handy to have both pointing to the same place.

In terms of hosting, I'm not a fan of Blacknight anymore after a load of unannounced outages and general crapness. I heartily reccommend asmallorange as a great host if you want value for money ($25 a year is a great price!), and their support is suberb, and i've not had any down time with them... if you're a little more techy, linode allows you to set up your own VPS, and so have total control over every aspect of your server

dinneenp

It's not for a business; it's just to give http://pacork.wordpress.com a 'better' url.

There's one in mind that I have but the .com is taken.

(I also want to change the style or my blog but that's always on the shefl)

DougL

If I had it to do over again, I would have registered a .ie domain with my name from the start. I only ever envisioned it being a hobby, so I just set up http://dougsphotoblog.wordpress.com at the time. After a year of blogging, I have a good number of images, and I'm thinking of setting up a more professional looking site, but now I have to start over with a new domain, and get my readers to swap over. Not ideal.

I registered douglaslane.ie just this week with Blacknight. It was only €20 for a year (not €40 as someone else mentioned). So far, I find Blacknight very professional and full-featured. To be frank, I don't think a small photography site needs 24x7 support and I certainly wouldn't want to pay for that service myself.

-Doug

Heebie

A good URL is important if you want it to be memorable.
Also, one that relates to either you, or your photography, and DOESN'T mention products/organisations etc.. If it says "wordpress" in the URL for example.. it looks very amateurish.

(I've worked in the web hosting industry on & off.. since the late 1990's.. and I know what sites get traffic on the systems we host.)

If boards.ie had gone with "bulletinboards.ie" or "noticeboards.ie".. would anyone be arsed with typing that whole thing?

filmfan

For 10 dollars you can map your domain to your website, I did it and it saves a lot of hassle, means you can use wordpress but have the nice domain

dinneenp

Hi,
Update:
Went throught Blacknight.
Got url request accepeted.
Once I have everything sorted I'll share the url with ye...
keep watching this space.
It's a url I'm suprised wasn't taken before.....

filmfan

Well done, nice to have it sorted!

Ricky91t

I'm using blacknight for my domain ( had some issues with digiweb! ) and hostso.com for my host, Based in the US but they give a generous 200GB of space, and for €7.50 a year their service is surprisingly stable and has never been down, Also I used to have issues when uploading large numbers of files with digiwebs service, Never had the issue with hostso.

They have 24x7 online chat( which has always been able to help ) which is much nicer than dealing by email, and waiting up to two days for a response.

Now before people start slating hostso(or me), Please take into consideration:

I'm not rich, I'm a student, I don't want to be spending €50 a year on a host and a domain.

I don't care about phone support, I'd rather not waste my time/credit on my phone, when I can be chatting to support via the online chat and editing websites at the same time.

Also the site in my sig is the one hosted on hostso, Check it out and compare pings to Irish hosts if you want.

Chorcai

Slight legal question here, if I set up a personal .ie site and 6 months down the road I want to sell prints from it, do I have to go throught the CRO/VAT etc etc Or would I just declare it at the end of year as extra income.

Also would the change in the site from personal to business site effect the terms on which I agreed to the .ie domain.

I know when setting up a company you have to fax/email a copy of the CRO.

Registration is restricted to 3 categories of entity:

(1) Companies registered in Ireland

(2) Individuals resident in Ireland

(3) Entities possessing a 'real and substantive connection' with Ireland, for example those that trade in Ireland.

(4) Entities possessing a registered Irish or European Community trademark.

TinyExplosions

Chorcai wrote: »

Slight legal question here, if I set up a personal .ie site and 6 months down the road I want to sell prints from it, do I have to go throught the CRO/VAT etc etc Or would I just declare it at the end of year as extra income.

Also would the change in the site from personal to business site effect the terms on which I agreed to the .ie domain.

I know when setting up a company you have to fax/email a copy of the CRO.

Registration is restricted to 3 categories of entity:

(1) Companies registered in Ireland

(2) Individuals resident in Ireland

(3) Entities possessing a 'real and substantive connection' with Ireland, for example those that trade in Ireland.

(4) Entities possessing a registered Irish or European Community trademark.

Once it has been registered, you can do what you want with it (pretty much) -the restrictions are just in place to stop someone from outside Ireland swooping in and squatting on loads of URL's, so if you fulfill one of the criteria, you're good to go.

As for selling stuff on it and VAT etc, it's exactly the same as if you were selling stuff in person. If you're VAT registered, you can charge VAT on the products, if you're not you don't need to. As for tax, its up to you to declare it as extra income at the end of the year.

As for CRO, if you're not selling under your own name, then you should register with them. The slightly murky area (in my view) is if you're using "Tom Jones Photography" -technically as you added 'photography' at the end, you should register the business name, but I suspect that noone would kick up too much fuss if you didn't.

-As per usual, I'm not a lawyer, tax-man or anything of the above, so the advice may be wildly wrong, but it's what I would do!

filmfan

Best of luck with the site anyway, was wondering as well about changing the site from personal to business but let's hope we can get that far and then worry about it!

dinneenp

Finally have new URL and wordpress blog on it (just have to fix 'about' and 'aechive' pages.
Anyway here it is- http://www.photoblog.ie
to me it's a perfect URL for a photo blog, easy to remember and should get more traffic to my photoblog.

filmfan

Looks great well done on the hard work!

DougL

dinneenp wrote: »

Finally have new URL and wordpress blog on it (just have to fix 'about' and 'aechive' pages.
Anyway here it is- http://www.photoblog.ie
to me it's a perfect URL for a photo blog, easy to remember and should get more traffic to my photoblog.

Glad to hear you got the URL you were looking for! If you don't mind me asking, how did you manage to register that URL? Did you register it as a trading name? Or did the IEDR suddenly decided to relax the rules?

sNarah

Congrats on your new baby! Loving the name in regards to creating traffic it's very smart. Not sure if it takes away from "you" as a "brand" though or not, that would be my only worry about the name.

Really liking the lay-out, perfectly suited for photography blog. What I would change if I was you is the website's header (you know the way the tab shows the name?). I'd put your own name up there, so something like "Patrick Dinneen's Photoblog" instead of "Photoblog.ie", just to add a bit more personality to it and to make sure your readers understand it is your blog and not a collection of photographers.

I did noticed a small problem with your about section - the links are still HTML format it seems? My stupid internet is being too ridiculously slow to upload a printscreen of it, will try again a bit later or tomorrow.

Other than that, it's all looking nice, clean and shouting photography, well done!!

*edit - just clicked the "Archive" bit, 404 not found error shows. You might want to fix that!!*

sNarah

Here's the printscreen now: