Web Design for your Photography Business

[Stingrayangel]

Hi guys,

I know there are many guru here in photo business. So would like to find out, who you guys approach to set up your website? I'm not into graphic design so I'm not sure who should I approach. Would seniors here able to recommend some for my consideration? I had my own domain name now. So I would hope to tap on senior's expereince in getting a web designer or company that knows photographers' needs.

 

[catchlights]

if you have a hosting company, probably you have softaculous or fantastico in your Cpanel, you can pick any CMS or blog software as your platform, set up the website yourself.

or you can go online search of templates specifically design for photographers,

or you can search for hosting company specifically provide hosting for photographers,


personally I don't fancy about letting someone to design the site for me, may looks nice but not user friendly.
prefer to DIY, so I can tweak the design as many time as I like, and also update the contents as and when I want.

hope this help.

 

[Stingrayangel]

if you have a hosting company, probably you have softaculous or fantastico in your Cpanel, you can pick any CMS or blog software as your platform, set up the website yourself.

or you can go online search of templates specifically design for photographers,

or you can search for hosting company specifically provide hosting for photographers,

personally I don't fancy about letting someone to design the site for me, may looks nice but not user friendly.
prefer to DIY, so I can tweak the design as many time as I like, and also update the contents as and when I want.

hope this help.

Oh.. I din know that there are hosting company provides hosting for photographers.. U mean website like wix.com? I am not a graphic designer hehee.. So what senior say about cpanel and cms I'm not very sure off.. I did some search and found a few.. But I'm not so sure would seniors here spend thousands over to create a website.. I did thought of DIY.. But when comes to using programming tools I am not well trained.. Thank u senior.. U've been a great help at least now I understand DIY would be better for photographers..

 

[Stingrayangel]

Thank u senior.. I think I still new to app and had send u private message instead of posting here.. At least now I know it would be better to DIY yourself.. Senior did mentioned about searching hosting company for photographers.. U mean wix.com? As I am not sure about web design so what u mean cpanel and cms is totally new to me.. I do search a few hosting companies in Singapore but at a high prices.. I'm not sure do photographers paid thousands to put on their sites? I am willing to pay around 4-500 and some monthly maintenance of the site.. Wow i saw senior's website DIY leh not bad.. I am trying to look at something very different from those common designs by companies Simple yet elegant prefer not to have flash... But I sort of got what u mean..

 

[catchlights]

speaking on online presence, it is not as simple like having a website is all you need.
have a website is nice, but is totally useless if there is no traffic, so why spend the money on building a beautiful site, if you don't have a total plan, who can guarantee it will bring you customers?

if just for portfolio purpose, maybe you can try using flickr, blogspot or multiply for the time being.

 

[David Kwok]

speaking on online presence, it is not as simple like having a website is all you need.
have a website is nice, but is totally useless if there is no traffic, so why spend the money on building a beautiful site, if you don't have a total plan, who can guarantee it will bring you customers?

if just for portfolio purpose, maybe you can try using flickr, blogspot or multiply for the time being.

That is pretty true, so many years in the IT line, yet I don't even own a single personal website. :bsmilie: Nothing to share via the website for me

I like flickr, it retains the quality of the original image and also the meta-data if you like to publish them.

To TS:

If you have some IT skills, there is an almost free one year solution to trial. If you like the idea and the cost involved, you can make it stay, though you will need to pay for the price of a VPS. It's the commonly talked about Amazon Elastic Cloud. For new users, first year web tier free of charge for a micro server on 24x7. If not, you can always shift it back to a simple web hosting.

Joomla is a good start. For normal users, it's mostly about using the assorted extensions available commercially and non-commercially(free).

But important is indeed what catchlights mentioned, do you have a good enough reason to setup a website. If not, it is most likely just a white elegant sitting inside the forest, and worse, no one even knows it exist If you are into some sort of business and using it to set a branding and also disseminate information to your existing and potential clients, then yes, it's a good online solution to couple with an effective offline management skills on your business

Btw the way "DIY" is already Do-It-Yourself. Sounds weird for a statement to be "Do It Yourself Yourself". :bsmilie:

 

[Stingrayangel]

Yes seniors!! You guys are right.. Spending So expensively din really justify.. I wanted a website as I'm into wedding business. I maybe doing freelance, but I am very serious and committed to my works.. Having an official website for myself is to project an image. After seeing some of the online web design I find that they are common but expensive.. So I decided to seek advise from seniors on the opinion of having an expensive official website. I have a Flickr pro account as well as Facebook page.. I have seen dead poet website and is very much impressed. Since I have paid a domain name , might as well ask around who can do web design for photographers.. And to seek more advise over here.. Btw dead poet is also one of the seniors here in Clubsnap..

 

[Agetan]

Hi,

Here is what I think... creating website is easy, either use one of those service like Zenfolio, Blog template or buying a website template or have it professionally design is come down to the cost and what you like. For website template, you can look at www.bludomain.com (or something like that).

However, before creating a website, please make sure you have a "Body of work" that shows your vision. If you haven't got that, the first step is to make sure you work hard to create the body of work that really show who you are then create a website.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Hart

 

[David Kwok]

Yes seniors!! You guys are right.. Spending So expensively din really justify.. I wanted a website as I'm into wedding business. I maybe doing freelance, but I am very serious and committed to my works.. Having an official website for myself is to project an image. After seeing some of the online web design I find that they are common but expensive.. So I decided to seek advise from seniors on the opinion of having an expensive official website. I have a Flickr pro account as well as Facebook page.. I have seen dead poet website and is very much impressed. Since I have paid a domain name , might as well ask around who can do web design for photographers.. And to seek more advise over here.. Btw dead poet is also one of the seniors here in Clubsnap..

Actually nice website to start with doesn't have to be very expensive. Web hosting in Singapore will cost you around S$100-S$150 per year, you can buy your domain from godaddy at US$5-7 per year. Webdesigning is pretty subjective price depending on which kind of web design firm you go to. Actually to be frank, the simpler your website is, the better is to you as a photographer. Plain solid colour background makes your photos stand out the best and give that arty farty feeling on how your client looks at you. That's how I look at websites seriously...just me.

Plain and look nice is not easy actually Installation of Joomla on a standard web hosting that comes with a database, web server, normal php engine is pretty much about it. I believe 99.9% (if not 100%) of the web hosting offerings can accommodate. If you don't mind the latency, getting a web hosting in US will cost you even less, but I say for S$120 or less per year, it's not that bad for your business.

Spend a little more on getting good plugins, for photo gallery, and a nice template, that should get you started using less than $350.
If you like, I can help you setup the initial content management system for a light fee. I will also give you some guide on how to manage the contents on your own and directions to move on, but I doubt I have time to help manage for you. Actually using these well known CMS, you can jolly well maintain on your own

 

[Stingrayangel]

Hi,

Here is what I think... creating website is easy, either use one of those service like Zenfolio, Blog template or buying a website template or have it professionally design is come down to the cost and what you like. For website template, you can look at www.bludomain.com (or something like that).

However, before creating a website, please make sure you have a "Body of work" that shows your vision. If you haven't got that, the first step is to make sure you work hard to create the body of work that really show who you are then create a website.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Hart

I will check out on that website!! Thks!!

 

[Stingrayangel]

Actually nice website to start with doesn't have to be very expensive. Web hosting in Singapore will cost you around S$100-S$150 per year, you can buy your domain from godaddy at US$5-7 per year. Webdesigning is pretty subjective price depending on which kind of web design firm you go to. Actually to be frank, the simpler your website is, the better is to you as a photographer. Plain solid colour background makes your photos stand out the best and give that arty farty feeling on how your client looks at you. That's how I look at websites seriously...just me.

Plain and look nice is not easy actually Installation of Joomla on a standard web hosting that comes with a database, web server, normal php engine is pretty much about it. I believe 99.9% (if not 100%) of the web hosting offerings can accommodate. If you don't mind the latency, getting a web hosting in US will cost you even less, but I say for S$120 or less per year, it's not that bad for your business.

Spend a little more on getting good plugins, for photo gallery, and a nice template, that should get you started using less than $350.
If you like, I can help you setup the initial content management system for a light fee. I will also give you some guide on how to manage the contents on your own and directions to move on, but I doubt I have time to help manage for you. Actually using these well known CMS, you can jolly well maintain on your own

I got a domain name.. www.egphotography.co bought from network solution. I'm still looking around because this company also provides web hosting.. Thank you very much for offering despite your busy schedule!! After so many seniors advise I will think about how to go about it carefully. After all, if I am serious, I must plan carefully how my website turn out to be.. Thks guys..

 

[hanqiang1011]

Oh.. I din know that there are hosting company provides hosting for photographers.. U mean website like wix.com? I am not a graphic designer hehee.. So what senior say about cpanel and cms I'm not very sure off.. I did some search and found a few.. But I'm not so sure would seniors here spend thousands over to create a website.. I did thought of DIY.. But when comes to using programming tools I am not well trained.. Thank u senior.. U've been a great help at least now I understand DIY would be better for photographers..

Hi,

I built one website off YouTube's video on Flash and DreamWeaver. If you got $$$, get find a website builder.

Cheers

 

[sinned79]

i DIY myself since i came from a web programmer background.

i always like white and simple websites, so my site is plain and simple too.

i host my portfolio photos on flickr and pulled these photos to my site using free flash gallery script that allow flickr integration. this way, it saves me some bandwidth on my hosting account.

my website hosting plan cost me less then $100 a year and the domain name cost me more then the usual .com though since i registered for a .sg domain

my emails is hosted on google app, since their spam protection is more powerful then the spam tool my webhost uses.

 

[Agetan]

One more thing when you do a website.

You will need to ensure the website will load faster. As a general rule, if your website don't come up within second and have great images that hold your audience for the next 2-3 seconds, you lost the contact.

I will discourage the use of external link to showcase your work if you want to push up your website traffic hence increase your search engine optimization.

I used to link to my external site for my gallery and I never to be found on google, since my move all galleries and images back to my website, the ranking improve and for the selected keywords, I am rank on the top 3-5 on the first page of google which in terms give me some 400,000 - 500,000 hits a month every month for the past 18 months.

Of course, when you first start, cost is an issue but it pays to get it done right and continue to grow from there.

a website is a central of your portfolio.... So don't skim....

Hosting site is another thing, if the reliability is poor and the speed is slow, there isn't much point of using it, even if it is cheap.

But as I said, create the body of work first and you shall be rewarded, I had a quick look on your Facebook page, I can see you have some nice work, but it hasn't give me an idea of your body of work. So you might want to work hard on this area.

Good luck.

Regards,

Hart

 

[Stingrayangel]

i DIY myself since i came from a web programmer background.

i always like white and simple websites, so my site is plain and simple too.

i host my portfolio photos on flickr and pulled these photos to my site using free flash gallery script that allow flickr integration. this way, it saves me some bandwidth on my hosting account.

my website hosting plan cost me less then $100 a year and the domain name cost me more then the usual .com though since i registered for a .sg domain

my emails is hosted on google app, since their spam protection is more powerful then the spam tool my webhost uses.

Wow.. it's good to know so much technology to go w ur photography interest..

 

[Stingrayangel]

Hi,

I built one website off YouTube's video on Flash and DreamWeaver. If you got $$$, get find a website builder.

Cheers

Definitely.. As I'm still browsing around..

 

[Stingrayangel]

One more thing when you do a website.

You will need to ensure the website will load faster. As a general rule, if your website don't come up within second and have great images that hold your audience for the next 2-3 seconds, you lost the contact.

I will discourage the use of external link to showcase your work if you want to push up your website traffic hence increase your search engine optimization.

I used to link to my external site for my gallery and I never to be found on google, since my move all galleries and images back to my website, the ranking improve and for the selected keywords, I am rank on the top 3-5 on the first page of google which in terms give me some 400,000 - 500,000 hits a month every month for the past 18 months.

Of course, when you first start, cost is an issue but it pays to get it done right and continue to grow from there.

a website is a central of your portfolio.... So don't skim....

Hosting site is another thing, if the reliability is poor and the speed is slow, there isn't much point of using it, even if it is cheap.

But as I said, create the body of work first and you shall be rewarded, I had a quick look on your Facebook page, I can see you have some nice work, but it hasn't give me an idea of your body of work. So you might want to work hard on this area.

Good luck.

Regards,

Hart

Thank you Hart.. My body of work.. Does it includes the style and the ideas of how I shoot wedding and ppl portfolio? As u mentioned I must produce my body of work before I could launch my website..

Best regards,
Eric

 

[Agetan]

It means the style that is ready to identify your work and different from the rest of your peer, what the clients can't see in the market and it represent your vision.

Regards,

Hart

 

[sjackal]

Agreed with Hart but don't wait too long, for a photog is constantly learning and evolving. Most people will be mediocre at first before a personal style starts to form and it never really stays in the same shape forever.

 

[Stingrayangel]

It means the style that is ready to identify your work and different from the rest of your peer, what the clients can't see in the market and it represent your vision.

Regards,

Hart

My style.. I'm still developing.. so far.. I was been told my candid shots are very well captured.. perhaps I should work further on these on how to develop my style through candid shots.. Thks Hart!