Professional Website

southofnowhere

Hi there,

Looking for the advice of photographers with experience of running a website.

I'm helping a friend with his marketing (he's the photographer (talent!), not me) and the very first thing that needs addressing is his website.

Now, I'm full of ideas for marketing/promotion for him, but I'm not great on web development - to put it mildly. I run my own blog and I'm grand with analytics, SEO etc But for the actual development of a website, I'm not the man.

I've been researching various templates/services etc (e.g. Photocratic, Photoshelter etc) and checking out the options. Here's what I need really:

Something that:

- Looks good and works.
- Is powered by an easy-to-use CMS (like Wordpress), so my friend can easily use it for his business without having to get too technical about it, coding in particular is a no-no.
- Is ecommerce enabled so he can easily sell his work.
- Has the capacity for a huge amount of images. He is mainly a press photographer and would be adding up to 200 (or more) photos to this site every week. It will have to have a massive archive then.
- Doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

I'm sure plenty of you have been down this road.

What are people's opinions, experience and advice?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Photoshelter?

Ballyman

A wordpress themed front end with zenfolio integrated for the e-commerce side of it. They have unlimited online storage and it costs about €100 per annum - one event will pay for it.

Thats what I use, you can have a look at it in my signature below - www.atl-photography.com

southofnowhere

@KKV http://www.photoshelter.com/

Just giving examples of what I looked at.

Zenfolio looks interesting alright Ballyman, thanks.

Your website is good too. Was it easy to set up/fine tune it to how you wanted it?

Have you had need to seek tech support? Is the customer service good?

I probably should have put this in the main forum, that was an accident, sorry. Feel free to move Mods.

southofnowhere

southofnowhere wrote: »

@KKV http://www.photoshelter.com/

Just giving examples of what I looked at.

Woops, sorry, my bad. I somehow didn't see it in the OP, and was actually suggesting it

southofnowhere

Ah, I see, no worries!

Do you use it/have you used it?

Looks good alright and like it would suit a busy professional, would love to hear from soneone who uses it though (not a testimonial).

The only real life example I'm familiar with is Newsfile.ie, to be honest. I've never used it myself (that is, i've never made a website using it or anything) so I can't really comment on that end of it.