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.

Nick,
I see you double posted this question in multiple forums. I think this is the best forum.

I use Zenfolio. why...they offer tons of customization options, several price plans and the result is a professional looking gallery.

Awesome and yeah if that is an issue ill delete it from the other one.
I just thought it would fit well in both and hope to optimize my answers

Thanks for your hasty response, ill be sure to check them out.

I'm seeing some really good things then some really bad things


web.com

also seems like a good one.

I like the pricing of Zenfolio from what I've seen but maybe ill keep looking for more opinions. 20% discount gets me a year for 112 bucks

I use zenfolio. Mainly because it was the cheapest I could find. I don't need anything too dramatic as I wanted to keep my website as simple as I could. I was going for the idea that the pictures should be the main attraction, not the website.

I do have to say, it can be a bit tricky to learn how to use it, but they have a ton of resources to help you with whatever you need. Once you figure it out, you can create a pretty nice website and I'm really happy with what I was able to make for the price point.

Does zenfolio let you create temp galleries for clients to select photos?

I currently use a LR plugin to export a webpage based on my selection.. (turning gate if you're familiar)
It lets customers select their favorites and add notes/suggestions/etc.

I'd like to have this functionality moving forward.

I just started on building a new site, so far I've been using SmugMug, but find their customizing tools too cumbersome and don't really like their templates. I tried zenfolio before too, but was not happy with the inconsistency of their templates. I want my menu to be in the same place on all pages and back then (a year or maybe more ago) this was not possible. I could place the menu anywhere on the home page, but all internal pages had it on the top right.

Right now I'm working on a squarespace page, pretty easy to create a site. If I stay with it after the trial period I'll use their cheapest plan of $8/month as I don't expect to sell anything, if there should ever be more than the one free sale per month I'd upgrade to their higher plans.

What I want from my site is
consistent nice and easy to navigate layout on all pages
nice galleries
a blog page

integrated sales if that should ever come up are an option.

you can also have password protected pages, important for pros that want to have a page for their clients, those pages can also be unlisted on your menu so you just send them a ling to that page with the password, nobody else will see the page. So far I'm pretty happy, but I have only played with it a little bit. Worth checking out!

Dan Kearley wrote in post #17521281
Does zenfolio let you create temp galleries for clients to select photos?

I currently use a LR plugin to export a webpage based on my selection.. (turning gate if you're familiar)
It lets customers select their favorites and add notes/suggestions/etc.

I'd like to have this functionality moving forward.

Yes, Client can select photos, give selected photos a name and email it to you. You can just simply download it.

A happy Zenfolio user!

I heard great things about squarespace but have not try it. Zenfolio can do all those that you mentioned now Phantelope. I custom it the way I want it (with Zenfolio awesome supports) as all the options are available.

thanks Tigerkn, I'll take a look again there then too. I need to have a custom domain name with no branding from the host too, seems like their $120/year plan offers that. I'm still in trial mode with squarespace, just using some placeholder images right now.

phantelope wrote in post #17521384
thanks Tigerkn, I'll take a look again there then too. I need to have a custom domain name with no branding from the host too, seems like their $120/year plan offers that. I'm still in trial mode with squarespace, just using some placeholder images right now.

You are correct though I thought it is $140, where did you see that it is $120?

sorry, typo, $140 is correct. I see they integrate with Mpix and MpixPro, but seem to charge quite a bit per sale (12%), not that I expect any sales. squarespace seems to charge only a CCard fee plus 30ct. If I understand those things correctly

If somebody plans to have sales it's good to look into the fees and charges that will accrue.

I built mine, because I couldn't be arsed to get a pro, and yes, I'm still going to do the redesigning of the website, once I've cooled down

My website is a self hosted Wordpress site. I was initially going to go with SqaureSpace since I built a trial site ages ago, and liked how everything on their site worked. Although I believe their themes may have changed so I ended up checking out Wordpress.Org which I found a really great free Theme. I already had a domain with a local hosting company who was highly recommended and reliable (I live in Aus so didn't really want to go with GoDaddy) so I decided to set it up myself and use the host (which is actually cheaper than SS for me).

I'm fine with going through code and changing things but I don't think I could do it all from scratch so I rather get an existing theme and change it to how I like.

Hello,
I spent something like one week working on my website!

I didn't want to use wordpress, joomla or any other content management tool because I wanted to have full control over my website.

At that time I was lucky to find bootstrap3, (a HTML, CSS, JS framework), and lots of bootstrap3 teplates like these.

The main advantage of bootstrap3 is that it is a reactive framework. This means that the same HTML code works for desktop, tablets and mobile devices... In fact, if you resize the browser, all the elements move to a new position, and other elements get hidden into collapsible menus. This is a must for any website nowadays!

My website uses PHP. I use it only for including the header and footer code, and maintain an uniform look in all files!