Comparing portfolio website products

Jasmine,

you might get more of a response by not forcing people to register an account with your blog. Just a thought…

thanks for the feedback, i’ve received a fair amount of lame spam in the past, which is why I changed it to register

hi again daniel, thanks for pointing out the registration thing. I’ve changed it so you have to fill out name and email but not be registered.

Nitpicking: A Photo Folio requires an additional $17 monthly subscription on top of the initial $1000 fee; Graph Paper Press themes do start at $0 but only go up to $99 if you opt for the discounted one year “membership” which gives access to all themes and, more importantly, online support forums. It can cost more if you pay by quarterly installments. Their themes can integrate with PhotoShelter but don’t have to.

Re A Photo Folio . . . if you compare prices among portfolio websites, APF is actually a bargain. While the upfront cost at many other companies may be less, users end up paying $40-50 a month for their sites.

Best bet is to figure out the one, two and five year costs for a site from a particular company.

Like a lot of guys here, i’m with Photo Shelter. I took the 29,99/month package, 30 gig storage, enough for me for now as I prefer to use my own storage on Drobo HD. I heard everywhere that PS suppose to be the best at positioning your site (SEO), first page on google. I even took one of their webinars on this topic. But a guy i know, who’s a specialist at positioning website (he earn his life doing this) told me that PS have a lot less control on that then they pretend.

The problem I have with a lot of the companies on my list is that their sites look very straight out of the box templatey. Unless you hire a designer to hack up the template and tweak the css to give you a more custom look… Who do you think has the best selection of designs that need the least tweaking to look custom?

I had good luck integrating a couple of choices. I like the Photocrati wordpress templates. I then added my Photoshelter and integrated them with some very simple CSS and HTML coding. I am NOT a software person at all.

Jasmine, were are you getting spam? There are a lot of ways to protect your site passively from the point of view of a vistor. If you have a photo editor or buyer going to your site, the first thing they will do upon having to register or sign in will be moving on to the next site on their list.

Does anyone have a graph paper press or other wordpress theme-based portfolio website (not just your blog) that is highly customized? I’d love to see URLs that show sites that don’t look like templates.

Have you looked at WIX, PHOTOBIZ.COM or BLU DOMAIN? They are all reasonable and have a good selections of Flash Web Templates

Hi Sara,
I have photobiz and blue domain on the list, but hadn’t heard about wix, I’ll check them out.

Is anyone using photobiz, I’d love to hear if you are happy with their SEO. Like everyone, they say they have great SEO through deep-linking, html mirror sites and xml mapping…

the prices are reasonable and they have a lot of designs and it seems easy to customize by using your own background image..

There are lot of different solutions. Photoshelter and all are good – I understand that you can sell stock through them and offer proofing for clients etc.

I have built my own site using RapidWeaver (it has its own flash slideshow generator) with one of my own custom themes and that also seems to work quite well. See:

http://www.focusphotos.com/features/features.html

As for SEO there are some simple tricks like logging a site map with Google etc. Also making sure that your site is tagged and linked around the web helps a lot. The more links you have to your site, the easier it is for the bots to find it. Meta tags are apparently less useful these days, the bots like content – so a site with just photos on it will not get searched. Make sure you add some text.

Tagging your site through facebook and twitter is a good thing to do as well.

If anyone needs help setting up a site, let me know…!

Andy

I’m currently using Dripbook.com which I didn’t see listed.

I find it works well and the price is right (I have the old rates before the price increase; $25 instead of $39 per month for premium).

It has most of the essential social plugins and widgets which makes it easy to cross post quickly. SEO and google analytics support built in.

It’s honestly been one of the best sites I’ve had and been fully comfortable with. It’s also a sourcebook which is a nice plus.

My only problems with Dripbook is the Mobil/iPhone/HTML version of the site is not quite upto snuff, It has all of the pertinent info but doesn’t seem to scale well to smaller screens. They are pretty good about updates so I’m sure its coming soon though.

@ Jasmine, quoting: “Does anyone have a graph paper press or other wordpress theme-based portfolio website (not just your blog) that is highly customized? I’d love to see URLs that show sites that don’t look like templates.”

I run http://www.bitemagazine.net and http://www.diederikmeijer.com, both are Wordpress based, I have customized themes and CSS myself.

I really enjoy using clickbooq.

What is best is that you do have the ability to drop in lovely graphics if you so choose as a base.

Support is very responsive and quite helpful.

M

Whatever you do, don’t use flash based sites. As someone who looks at photographer’s websites on a daily basis, the end of flash can’t come too soon. Slow, unwieldy and f*cking annoying is how I would describe these sites.

Tom

I recently put together my website using Graph Paper Press. They came out with some new themes that leverage Wordpress 3.0. My theme is called Widescreen. I made a few custom changes and I’m still working on it, but the basic structure is in place.

I host my photos on SmugMug Pro. It’s unlimited storage and ecommerce enabled for $150 per year. Instead of embedding flash galleries I made kind of a bold move and embedded single photos that are html based similar to The Boston Globe’s Big Picture gallery.

It’s totally iPad and iPhone viewable. The SEO seems to working great because I come up in the top three with name and I get a constant stream of visitors that find my site with search engines looking for related content I post to my blog. They are finding me. I’m averaging about 200 visitors a day according to my blog stats.

Feedback welcome.

Thomas Boyd
http://thomasboyd.net

Have a look at indexhibit. It’s not quite a straight-out-of-the-box option although you can use it as such, super stripped down. It’s highly customisable with some basic CSS and HTML. And free, unless you feel like donating €15.

Hey

For a clean portfolio site you can always get my template.

See http://www.flashphotoportfolio.com/

I use it and a few members here do too. It is just a one time purchase and then you owe it forever.

www.tomvancakenberghe.com is mine for example.

Cheers and plugs
Tom

I find viewbook.com it to be a simple system that lets your photography stand out. It’s flash based but creates a secondary mobile version that the user is routed to if they try to view your site on a mobile device. Here’s my viewbook site http://chimodu.viewbook.com

Hey,

I can recommend www.cargocollective.com. Yes, it´s more made for Designer purposes, but you can edit HTML and CSS for a fee which is about 66 Dollars a year (Then Google Analytics is supported too). The Problem is actually, that captions and informations are not supported within the slideshow module. If you are familiar with coding, there may be better options. The Basic Account is free, and includes 100 MB Webspace and CSS editing…

sincerely,

n.
www.CargoCollective.com/NilsBroeer

Though I’m currently using a website that I built myself using Dreamweaver and SlideshowPro, I thought that the following blog post by David Degner was quite useful. Here’s the link:

http://www.incendiaryimage.com/sketchbook/portfolio-website-software-for-photographers/

Regards,

Thaddeus

I know it has been mentioned, but I’m having a blast playing with WIX—start with a blank site and only your imagination limits you—that and the fact that it is Flash-heavy…

Anybody have alter-it-yourself templates and FREE websites that do not use Flash?

I use aphotofolio and have nothing but great things to say about it. Rob Haggart is always up on the latest technologies and all of the updates are free.

Cheers,
GuessTheLighting.com

I’ve been using squarespace.com

Can be a little glitchy at times, but really not too bad. Customer service is excellent. $20/mo unlimited and they just released some new templates. Been looking around to see what other options would be, but most seem about the same or not as good. I’m happy with it.

Do note that this post originally is over two years old. The marketplace changes quite a bit in two years.