Who built your website and why

I have been using wordpress since it is easy and I can manage it myself.

I don't make much money from Photography for now so that is why I opted this way.

I want a cleaner, better way to display my work.


http://www.sincerephot​ography.us/


I've been looking around and I can't really find a solid place recommended by many.

I was gonna use Odesk since they are really cheap and do very good work.


Thoughts or maybe links to your site + who built it?

Also how the upkeep is for you and if you pay monthly etc.

I built it. I upkeep it. My only monthly costs are my hosting company and annual domain registration.

I used to host, use, and build on Wordpress.org. I don't have the time or desire to deal with that anymore so I've switched to Squarespace now.

I have three, all built in WordPress with themes from Elegant Themes. All the e-commerce stuff and most of the galleries are off site with links that, I hope, look like fit the theme.

memoriesoftomorrow wrote in post #17453174
I built it. I upkeep it. My only monthly costs are my hosting company and annual domain registration.

Same with me, mine may not be the best at the moment, but I am constantly working on it

I recently redid my Wordpress based website on my own. I did have to contact support for premium theme & framework that I use as well as some help from someone better skilled than me in CSS. Next project will be custom made shopping cart / invoicing system to make purchasing from website easier. Currently there are nothing similar that would match my vision & workflow.

I built mine with WP and Elegant Themes. Now, stupid NextGen refuses to upload any more photos. Opened a ticket with them and didn't go anywhere: they came out with a newer version but the problem persists. I give up. I'm gonna have it redone by a professional. Too much time wasted there trying to figure things out.

Alveric wrote in post #17453928
I built mine with WP and Elegant Themes. Now, stupid NextGen refuses to upload any more photos. Opened a ticket with them and didn't go anywhere: they came out with a newer version but the problem persists. I give up. I'm gonna have it redone by a professional. Too much time wasted there trying to figure things out.

I've had problems with every gallery I've tried in WP. So I just link to may galleries at ShootProof, Crated, and Fine Art America. My main site, http://www.myrsphoto.c​om, also has a link to a TourBuzz virtual tour. There are a few other things but nothing using any of the WP galleries, I just find them clumsy.

I built my own in Wordpress and integrated Woocommerce. I prefer total control and I just cant bring myself to pay a monthly fee for these monthly sites where it looks like 50 other photographers.

Crated is free. Shootproof is free for the first 100 images and has pretty good appearance options. I am able to make my ShootProof site look like it fits right in with my WP site. Fine Arts America is free but if you want the personalization options and an address that looks like yours you $30 per year. My FAA site also blends into my WP site quite nicely.

E-commerce on your WP site is a pain to set up and maintain (unless you run it through PayPal) and credit card stuff is even more of a problem. You're either going to spend a lot of office time (when you could be shooting) making everything work or you're going to pay someone to manage it for you. Unless you're pretty big, doing it yourself is not cost effective compared to paying small fees for services designed for smaller businesses.

rgs wrote in post #17453994
I've had problems with every gallery I've tried in WP. So I just link to may galleries at ShootProof, Crated, and Fine Art America. My main site, http://www.myrsphoto.c​om, also has a link to a TourBuzz virtual tour. There are a few other things but nothing using any of the WP galleries, I just find them clumsy.

I've started using Envira Gallery and upgraded to Platinum license. I was after one of the features that Gold license or above offered and having paid product with support was easier than to code my own custom made solution. They have a Lite (free) version that will suit all average users.

rgs wrote in post #17454196
Crated is free. Shootproof is free for the first 100 images and has pretty good appearance options. I am able to make my ShootProof site look like it fits right in with my WP site. Fine Arts America is free but if you want the personalization options and an address that looks like yours you $30 per year. My FAA site also blends into my WP site quite nicely.

E-commerce on your WP site is a pain to set up and maintain (unless you run it through PayPal) and credit card stuff is even more of a problem. You're either going to spend a lot of office time (when you could be shooting) making everything work or you're going to pay someone to manage it for you. Unless you're pretty big, doing it yourself is not cost effective compared to paying small fees for services designed for smaller businesses.

Wordpress is a platform used by millions of websites. There are a lot of choices for themes (appearance of the website) and plugins (addons like ecommerce, gallery, contact form, etc). Finding suitable themes is a lot easier than finding plugins that have exact features you are looking for. All plugins need to be installed and configured. All premium (paid) ecommerce plugins have payment gateways integration (ie. Paypal, 2Checkout, Authorize.Net, etc). I think the main challenge is integrating all the plugins to work together.

Here is a good example of integration problems with Wordpress - you have a nice gallery plugin that creates nice looking galleries of your best work. You run Woocommerce (popular ecommerce choice for WP) but it creates a separate section on your website that has a catalog of items for sale. If someone visits your gallery and likes an image in order to buy it the person would have to leave your gallery page and visit another page and find your image there. You are using Wordpress to display your galleries and have option to sell online, yet 2 main components are not working together.

To get proper results with complicated things you often need the help of a skilled professional. An amateur photographer with a lot of big photography components might not be able to use them in the same capacity as a pro photographer would.