toastydeath
TPF Noob!
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- Oct 14, 2006
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Preface.
Having a general webpage is an excellent way to share photos with forums, family, and friends. It's a simple process to put up a rudimentary webpage using Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or handwritten HTML. The tools are fairly intuitive, and most hosting providers have brief tutorials on publishing what you've created. This way, you can share your pictures no matter where you are, and not worry about specific usage/copyright demands many free image hosts have.
This thread is meant as "ideal situation." If you are going to do this professionally, this is what you need to shoot for. If you are an amateur, hopefully this will provide some good starting points to look for information and develop ideas about what to do.
Understand if you want to attract business or present a serious online resume as a photographer, it is not simple and lots of work is involved.
Like any paper resume, an unimpressive or visually poor presentation will get you passed over very quickly. Thinking about selling pictures? Forget it entirely. You need to start out local in galleries, art shows, and wherever else you can plaster prints ready to sell. The internet is a gargantuan network that spans the globe. By comparison, most individuals are amateur photographers no one has ever heard of. The search engines have NO evidence they should present your webpage as relevant to any search until you get recognition and links from other webpages. They're in the business of providing the best results for a given search, and you aren't the best result. So, you need to view it in that context. You must get out, on foot, and promote yourself through galleries and other hard photographic experience. Once your name starts to turn up and you have advertisements both online and in the real world, your webpage will grow in popularity. You aren't going to get any hits except for friends, family, and forum members until you make it as a photographer. It's how the web works in the new millennium.
If this is a webpage used in something you are going into as a full time job, stop reading this here and go pay someone.
Do not expect to crank out an amazing webpage. It's a learning process, and you'll eventually hire someone else to redo your webpage if you become successful. You will not rise to the level of creating professional webpages unless that is what you do as a business. Do not fool yourself: If you are becoming a photographer, become a photographer. I can do web development, but not design. I would need to hire someone else to do that. I already know all the languages and server administration involved, but I am not a designer. I can code database applications, and do all sorts of fancy things. But I am not a designer. Again, do not fool yourself. Risking business is not worth the savings. If you are easing into the business world or keeping it a weekend job, you can afford to do this, and can present yourself as a weekend-jobber.
Now that that bit of reality is out of the way, on to building webpages.
Successful, serious business websites or websites for other professional purposes are not done in Flash, Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or plain-jane HTML.
There are exceptions to this. But the people who do web design and development for a living are the only people who know when those exceptions are. You haven't the slightest idea, so go return that copy of SuperDuperWebPageBuilderPro 5.
These are the tools you will need to build a small but serious website. All of the tutorials you need to get started are on W3Schools (an amazing resource and reference):
You will need additional items, such as a good text editor. I'm going to leave this up to the reader, as so many options exist. Notepad2 (Free), EditPad, and UltraEdit are common choices. VIM and Emacs are also very common free editors, but they are difficult to learn.
Go to your library and borrow some books on proper web design and the applications above. Better yet, buy some.
There is just too much to talk about in terms of making a webpage that makes sense. You need to be comfortable writing formal essays, because that's what a business webpage is. You have to understand where to put things on a page, what color to make them, and other design considerations that have a serious impact on how effective your site is in generating you business. You are about to put in a very serious effort, and if you do it wrong, you are going to have to go back and fix it. Do it right the first time around. By the way, the For Dummies books are not what you are looking for. You are looking for serious discourse on using powerful tools.
The last time I was just goofing around and made a webpage using this set of tools, it wound up being 2134+ lines of text, excluding whitespace lines. It wasn't finished, and it had bugs. But it took a long time to do. If you make a poor decision or take a shortcut in the beginning, you're going to have to review the entire thing to see what happened.
Some quick tips on winding up with a non-retarded webpage.
continued in next post...
Having a general webpage is an excellent way to share photos with forums, family, and friends. It's a simple process to put up a rudimentary webpage using Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or handwritten HTML. The tools are fairly intuitive, and most hosting providers have brief tutorials on publishing what you've created. This way, you can share your pictures no matter where you are, and not worry about specific usage/copyright demands many free image hosts have.
This thread is meant as "ideal situation." If you are going to do this professionally, this is what you need to shoot for. If you are an amateur, hopefully this will provide some good starting points to look for information and develop ideas about what to do.
Understand if you want to attract business or present a serious online resume as a photographer, it is not simple and lots of work is involved.
Like any paper resume, an unimpressive or visually poor presentation will get you passed over very quickly. Thinking about selling pictures? Forget it entirely. You need to start out local in galleries, art shows, and wherever else you can plaster prints ready to sell. The internet is a gargantuan network that spans the globe. By comparison, most individuals are amateur photographers no one has ever heard of. The search engines have NO evidence they should present your webpage as relevant to any search until you get recognition and links from other webpages. They're in the business of providing the best results for a given search, and you aren't the best result. So, you need to view it in that context. You must get out, on foot, and promote yourself through galleries and other hard photographic experience. Once your name starts to turn up and you have advertisements both online and in the real world, your webpage will grow in popularity. You aren't going to get any hits except for friends, family, and forum members until you make it as a photographer. It's how the web works in the new millennium.
If this is a webpage used in something you are going into as a full time job, stop reading this here and go pay someone.
Do not expect to crank out an amazing webpage. It's a learning process, and you'll eventually hire someone else to redo your webpage if you become successful. You will not rise to the level of creating professional webpages unless that is what you do as a business. Do not fool yourself: If you are becoming a photographer, become a photographer. I can do web development, but not design. I would need to hire someone else to do that. I already know all the languages and server administration involved, but I am not a designer. I can code database applications, and do all sorts of fancy things. But I am not a designer. Again, do not fool yourself. Risking business is not worth the savings. If you are easing into the business world or keeping it a weekend job, you can afford to do this, and can present yourself as a weekend-jobber.
Now that that bit of reality is out of the way, on to building webpages.
Successful, serious business websites or websites for other professional purposes are not done in Flash, Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or plain-jane HTML.
There are exceptions to this. But the people who do web design and development for a living are the only people who know when those exceptions are. You haven't the slightest idea, so go return that copy of SuperDuperWebPageBuilderPro 5.
These are the tools you will need to build a small but serious website. All of the tutorials you need to get started are on W3Schools (an amazing resource and reference):
- HTML - http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
HTML is the basic language of the web. It tells the browser what to display. Links, images, tables, and other basic layout elements.
- CSS - http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
CSS is closely related to HTML. It describes how things should look on a webpage: Background colors, text color/font/size, default formatting, link color, etc. One file can be referenced across an entire page, so that site-wide changes can be made quickly.
- PHP - http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp
PHP is a programming language. It generates webpages on the fly. A good example of PHP is this forum. All the information about usernames, forums, and threads are stored in a database. The program, written in PHP, reads the data from the database and generates a new page every time we visit. For photography, this is used for galleries, blog posts, and other content that you want to add or change quickly.
- SQL - http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp
SQL is how PHP talks to the database. If you have an image gallery, your PHP program running the webpage has to get the image data and file locations from somewhere. You tell it where and how to get that information using SQL.
You will need additional items, such as a good text editor. I'm going to leave this up to the reader, as so many options exist. Notepad2 (Free), EditPad, and UltraEdit are common choices. VIM and Emacs are also very common free editors, but they are difficult to learn.
Go to your library and borrow some books on proper web design and the applications above. Better yet, buy some.
There is just too much to talk about in terms of making a webpage that makes sense. You need to be comfortable writing formal essays, because that's what a business webpage is. You have to understand where to put things on a page, what color to make them, and other design considerations that have a serious impact on how effective your site is in generating you business. You are about to put in a very serious effort, and if you do it wrong, you are going to have to go back and fix it. Do it right the first time around. By the way, the For Dummies books are not what you are looking for. You are looking for serious discourse on using powerful tools.
The last time I was just goofing around and made a webpage using this set of tools, it wound up being 2134+ lines of text, excluding whitespace lines. It wasn't finished, and it had bugs. But it took a long time to do. If you make a poor decision or take a shortcut in the beginning, you're going to have to review the entire thing to see what happened.
Some quick tips on winding up with a non-retarded webpage.
- Pick a uniform page width. 800 pixels is a good standard width. Do not make it any wider than necessary. Someone may have a 30" wide screen. Your webpage will look awful if you have it span the entire thing.
- Use left alignment. English is read from left to right. Trying to read a center-aligned page that is not properly sized (read: done by a professional) is difficult. Eliminating mistakes is the name of the game: just use left align for everything except tabular information.
- Soft, unsaturated background colors. You want the page to be easy on the eyes, and you want the webpage foreground to stand out. They should be ignoring the background.
- Break the background up some. Some webpages use a different background color where text and menus are: you can do this with CSS. This keeps the webpage visually stimulating during the boring task of browsing around for content.
- If you are selling something, anything, make sure you have a FULL set of contact information. A phone number, address/PO box, e-mail address, and a brief contact form are good things to have on a contact page. The contact form, if you include one, should be small. Consider not including a contact form, as many people have a hard time creating one that looks good.
- Write in a formal manner. Do not tell people what equipment you use, unless you have an autobiographical section. Consider not having one of these, as again, most people can't write one without it sounding horrid.
- Content sections that make sense. You want a couple content sections, to make the page look full and flush. If you do multiple kinds of photography, have a section for each, a welcome/home/about page, and a contact page. Things like that.
- Use PHP and CSS to make absolutely sure each page is identical. When one page to the next varies in color or style, it's as if you painted half a room poop brown and the other neon green. It takes a second to adjust to, and it reminds people they're on a webpage instead of searching for a photographer.
- Just because your friends like it, doesn't mean it looks good. They're your friends. I have friends with horrible taste. Be critical of your own work, and try to get some serious commentary on it. If you made your webpage without most of the "newbie" mistakes, you'll get good criticism on refining it. If you have a lot of beginner mistakes, the criticism you're going to get won't be helpful. Also, you probably won't be able to do anything with useful criticism if you're making those mistakes in the first place. This is why books are important.
continued in next post...