Website advice

[Jamie Douglas]

Hello

I am looking at setting up a website and have a few questions. Do I go down the road of a customized website or use something along the lines of Zenfolio or Wix.com?

http://www.zenfolio.com/ - A pro I met uses this and it looks good.

or this is my effort with Wix Web Templates: http://www.wix.com/jimdoug2010/jamie-in-progress

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Jamie

P.S I realise this is a subject which has probably been flogged to death so please point me to a previous thread if possible.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

There are quite a few people who have a zenfolio site but the main question is what you want to do with it. Do you want to show images of all species you photographed or do you want to sell prints?

[Jamie Douglas]

Hi Axel

I want to try and kill two birds with one stone (pardon the phrase :)). I have recently started doing family shoots etc and would like to market myself in that respect as well as showcase my nature photography and hopefully sell a few prints here and there. I do feel that maybe two seperate sites is the way to go but I very open to advice. I appreciate your response.

[Nancy A Elwood]

Jamie I use Smugmug, www.smugmug.com. You can customize it as much as you want or not, using their templates. Or use a combination of both, which I do. It is easy to update and the support is great. Also, you can sell from your website with their smugmug pro account.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I would probably keep nature and family photography separate. It might be easier to use a service that offers templates such as zenfolio or smugmug.

[Jamie Douglas]

Thanks Nancy, smumug looks really great so off to do some more research :) choices, choices, choices.

Axel: I agree, it would be confussing for viewers I think.

[allanrube]

I use Smugmug and also have my own site. I use Smugmug as it is easy to upload photos to post here and on other forums. With Smugmug (and I assume Zenfolio) you can have password protected galleries and also gallereis that are not listed.

I like the "roll your own" approach but it does take more time to create and to maintain than he big sites made for hosting.

Smug has 3 pricing levels. If you want to sell you would want either the highest or middle level.
My sig has my own site. My Smugmug site is at allanrube.com

[Dave Woeller]

I have used both Zenfolio and Smugmug (I have settled into Smug). I can say that Smugs' support is great and you can go with as much or as little customization as you wish. I am certainly not CSS skilled, and my site was set up with the easy customizer and a few cut and paste CSS code bits found in their tutorials. Zen has come a long way since I left them and seems to be a bit easier to do some customization. You can't miss with either. One point that some miss is that if you plan on selling, Zen in the only one of the two that currently accepts foriegn currencies in their cart. If you decide to go with Smug, you can use this code jk352aTYdTibw to recieve a $5.00 discount on your first year. Not much, but anything helps in todays world.

[Jamie Douglas]

Thanks for the feedback folks. I am swaying towards zenfolio at the moment so have another 12 days to decide. It looks like the a good enough solution for the time being and from what I can see and from what folks have said it will satisfy my requirements for the time being :)

Thanks again

Jamie