My spec for a website, suggestions please

[chris321]

Right people, hopefully this won't be too long a post, but sorry in advance if it is!

I'm at Uni, and I'm looking at getting more into portraiture and nightclub photography when I've built up a decent portfolio. However, i'm faced with a chicken-and-egg situation! When I'm out in clubs etc, I want to be able to hand out a card with my web address on (which I don't have yet, but more on that later ), but I can't really build a site yet ad I have nothing to put on it!

So, the plan... I go out to a club etc, take plenty of photos, process and upload them, then by the time the drunk revellers have begun to sober up, they find my card and look at the photos on my site. I'll be looking at selling prints or low-res watermarked jpegs for facebook, but I'll worry about that later!

So, the site... I've been playing about with HTML, and using expression web to build a site, and to be honest the results are pants. Nowhere near as professional as I would like, so I'll have to resort to templates from the hosting service.

So finally, the specification! I want to have access to decent templates, be able to upload quite a lot of photos, have my own web address, and a few e-mail addresses. With every service i've looked at there have been issues.... I didn't like the templates from Photium, Clikpic was too restrictive with numbers of photos, it seemed there was always a catch! I'm not fussed about selling online, just plenty of space (although I have a flickr pro account, not sure if I could use this to host the photos for a commercial site?), reasonable bandwidth, and a pretty template. I have no idea what kind of bandwidth to be looking at really, what would be recommended for this kind of thig?

In case it wasn't clear, I'm a student, so low price is fairly essential, but I'm aware that you get what you pay for!

Sorry if this is incoherant, I've been stressing over it for hours now and I'm in bed unable to sleep because my brain is in overdrive, typing all this on my phone! Please help?! Thanks a lot,

Chris

 

[KIPAX]

www.fotopic.net .. I ahve 85 thousand pictures hosted with them.. I can make the fotopic site part of mine as I ahve www.kipax.com and theres no bandwidth issues. and I get over 2 million pic views a year.. also since its takeover i havent had any problems.. and if ever you want to in the future you can start selling from it.

 

[rockfall]

how about using moonfruit? they have a free site builder too.

http://www.moonfruit.com/

 

[mattyh]

Wordpress and private hosting would do most of what you ask.

It's not plug and play, but with a bit of work, you can get a really nice, professional site from it. The only limit to uploads is the hosting you buy (eukhost offer good packages from £30, on shared hosting). There are 1000's of templates out there, and I've seen an ecommerce plugin for Wordpress, although I've not tried it YET, I will be doing soon...

Sources:

www.wordpress.com
www.wordpress.org
www.eukhost.com

and a good look around Google will reveal loads and loads of templates, both free and paid for.

 

[Craikeybaby]

I use Photoshelter, it is pricey, but you get what you pay for.

TBH as good as Wordpress is for blogs and even normal sites, there are probably better options for what you want to do, such as any of the hosted gallery packages available. There have been a few thread recently (I think also in the business forum) with people's experiences/advice.

 

[chris321]

www.fotopic.net .. I ahve 85 thousand pictures hosted with them.. I can make the fotopic site part of mine as I ahve www.kipax.com and theres no bandwidth issues. and I get over 2 million pic views a year.. also since its takeover i havent had any problems.. and if ever you want to in the future you can start selling from it.

Thanks for that, it looks interesting and it's good to know it can deal with the requirements of a pro sports/events photographer. While I'm not expecting a great amount of real interest, if I'm giving out cards to lots of people in a club, there might be a fair bit of traffic if nothing else and I wouldn't really like them to jut be met with a 'bandwidth exceeded' message!

how about using moonfruit? they have a free site builder too.

http://www.moonfruit.com/

Thanks, I'm looking into it now, but my new place has a painfully slow internet connection and the all the java and/or flash things aren't making things easy at the moment!

Wordpress and private hosting would do most of what you ask.

It's not plug and play, but with a bit of work, you can get a really nice, professional site from it. The only limit to uploads is the hosting you buy (eukhost offer good packages from £30, on shared hosting). There are 1000's of templates out there, and I've seen an ecommerce plugin for Wordpress, although I've not tried it YET, I will be doing soon...

Sources:

www.wordpress.com
www.wordpress.org
www.eukhost.com

and a good look around Google will reveal loads and loads of templates, both free and paid for.

Thanks a lot for the links, I've been looking at wordpress, but it seemed to be more of a blogging tool than a portfolio/gallery type thing. I tried googling it all last night, but after about 3 hours of reading I was no better off, so thought I'd put it to the more gifted minds here!