Starting a online portfolio. Suggestions?

[ernestoc33]

So I'm starting an online portfolio. I already have a domain and web hosting paid for the next year.
Does anyone host their own instead of using a service like smugmug or zenfolio?

Does anyone know of any good php based website scripts for achieving similar results to zenfolio or smugmug?
I'm starting out and I can't afford the price it costs to have the full features from those services.

thanks,
any advice helps.
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[Joey_Ricard]

If your time is not valuable then doing it yourself is fine.

A hosting service such as Zenfolio makes it easy for you to create galleries as easy as it is for you to create a folder on your PC and put images in it.

When you say full featured, are you talking about a permium account as opposed to the standard?

 

[ernestoc33]

If your time is not valuable then doing it yourself is fine.

A hosting service such as Zenfolio makes it easy for you to create galleries as easy as it is for you to create a folder on your PC and put images in it.

When you say full featured, are you talking about a permium account as opposed to the standard?

Its not that paying a monthly fee bothers me. For example with zenfolio I would have to upgrade from the 50/yr service to the 250/yr service to be able to watermark or protect my images from theft or sell any of them. With Smugmug I have to upgrade from the 40/yr service to the 150/yr service to do any of that. With no income from my photos now I can't justify going into the red to pay that much to do something that should come standard like photo security.

 

[Joey_Ricard]

Huh? I don't pay 250, I pay whatever the middle one is, I think it is 99 bucks, minus a 10% discount, water marks included.

Yes, I just looked, 100 per year, premium,

I should point out before you look at my stuff, that I only use Zen for the galleries, but use my own domain for the main and info pages. Now Zen does let you have all that included but I choose to do my own and match that with the galleries.

trust me, creating your own galleries is a big task, that is what I used to do, now this is so easy....100 bucks a year, unlimited bla bla bla, you get the idea

 

[Free1]

Maybe you could try the wordpress. It is very easy to use and it has many free themes. It is actually a blog tool which can be easily transformed into webage or portfolio.

 

[SCraig]

Maybe you could try the wordpress. It is very easy to use and it has many free themes. It is actually a blog tool which can be easily transformed into webage or portfolio.

I agree. If your hosting service has PHP and MySQL available (most do) then Wordpress will work fine. It is a free download and there are literally thousands of themes to tailor it to what you want. The only down side is that Wordpress can be somewhat slow to load at times. Once the first page is loaded, and all the background initialization has been completed, it works fine.

Here Is One that I started a month or so back. It is far from completed though.