Photo website

danalec99 · Sep 16, 2004

What would be the average rate for building a decent photo website? Any leads, recommendations.

Thanks,
-Daniel

PS: I was initially thinking of doing it myself, but my lack of knowledge would delay it further. So, I'm in the market. Looking for the best price and quality.

Digital Matt · Sep 16, 2004

Download Jalbum and make it yourself easily. I use this program to generate my gallery. It's pretty easy to use and requires no knowledge of HTML.

Alison · Sep 16, 2004

danalec99 said:
What would be the average rate for building a decent photo website? Any leads, recommendations.

Thanks,
-Daniel

PS: I was initially thinking of doing it myself, but my lack of knowledge would delay it further. So, I'm in the market. Looking for the best price and quality.

Not sure what you're looking for, but check out http://www.bludomain.com/interfaces/ I've been toying with having them redo my site for about 9 months now. Prices are the best I've seen around.

santino · Sep 16, 2004

unfortunately I can't help you on this one, I'm kinda old school, I develop the script in notepad (gives me more control, but you have to own html + javascript skills).

mentos_007 · Sep 17, 2004

you can easylu make it by yourself, using for example the photo gallery php script that makes alost everything for you. I worked as a web site designer and as far as I'm concearned the average price is depended on how well-built site you want. If you want to upload your photos automatically, that mean using php and sql scripts it will be much more expensive. But you shouldn't pay more than $200 here in Poland

I've no idea about rates in the place where you live.

danalec99 · Sep 17, 2004

Thanks everyone.

I love some of the interfaces in Bludomain. But since I'm not making any money from photography at the moment, I don't think I would want to go to that price range.

Has anyone heard of smugmug? Any comments about them?

Thanks!

mentos_007 · Sep 18, 2004

I know someone here use it, but I don't know exactly who... I'll search for you

maheanuu · Sep 18, 2004

and have for over 2 years... Great site and good software... Never had a problem with the site at all...

If you sign up with them please use me as a reference as I get a slight reduction for your introduction... either enter my personal code oqqjYKiEu1c7a or my email addy [email protected] would be great to have you there....

mygrain · Sep 18, 2004

I use Bravenet for hosting and built my site using Dreamweaver. Bravenet can give you a domain and tons of webspace with subdomains and email for about $85 a year and they offer all sorts of goodies to better equip your site.

Project 7 makes a gallery generator called "Showpic" built as an extension to dreamweaver that is pretty simple to use also. It does take some knowledge of how website design is done but learning a new skill is always a plus.

danalec99 · Sep 19, 2004

maheanuu said:
and have for over 2 years... Great site and good software... Never had a problem with the site at all...

If you sign up with them please use me as a reference as I get a slight reduction for your introduction... either enter my personal code oqqjYKiEu1c7a or my email addy [email protected] would be great to have you there....

Thanks maheanuu. If I decide to use them, I shall defenitely enter your code.

seo3y · Apr 18, 2005

I'll second maheanuu on the smugmug service - I've used them for a year now and could not be happier! Check out my galleries at http://scottieo.smugmug.com.

DIRT · Apr 18, 2005

regarding smugmug... i already have a website but dont like the system. can i transfer my website name over to smugmug? the smugmug seems to be more user freindly than who im with now (ipower/vdeck).

seo3y · Apr 19, 2005

The nice thing about smugmug is the ease of choosing your smugmug "nickname" which you can change at any time. I, for example, started out as "oshman" but changed to "scottieo," which would make my site's URL http://scottieo.smugmug.com. If you're talking about keeping the same domain name, that shouldn't be a problem if you registered the domain yourself (shouldn't you just need to redirect the IP forwarding feature?). Smugmug even offers pro level accounts which include a URL with your own domain name (ie. www.scottieophoto.com).

Rob · Apr 19, 2005

Daniel,

Getting it done properly is very expensive if you leave all the work to someone else. As others have suggested, download as many free gallery generators as you can and compare the results. Then compare those with the specific picture hosting sites like smugmug or say deviantart and see which meets your requirements for price / quality / time.

I would take three categories: Professionally developed, Self-developed and managed hosted and compare the pros and cons and price to choose one of the three methods.

Rob
p.s. I did it myself with an XML based generating program and it cuts the time down to a minimum as I can even include photoshop style actions like contrast and USM. It also allows hard watermarking which is essential if you don't want your pics scattered to the four winds.