Web Designing

[Aayria]

Apologies if this isn't an appropriate forum section for this post- Mods feel free to move this if need be!

In addition to enjoying the picture-taking aspect of photography, I've really found that I have a lot of interest in the buisiness side as well.. particularly developing and maintaining my own website

I know the website I have currently "works" and I do like it.. But as I've been improving and learning as a photographer I'd really like to update the portfolio with some stronger examples of my work. I thought this would be a good time to try my hand at a more advanced/professional approach to my website than the free design templates offered through wix.com.

I downloaded a few trials from adobe, but am feeling a bit lost and not sure where to start. Does anybody have experience with developing a portfolio style flash website, and recommend a particular program for building it? I'm only very very slightly versed in coding, so I prefer something that uses a more friendly interface (drag and drop or something more visual and less code oriented. )

Any tips or advice is greatly appreciated! I have a couple different programs to try out, and if I can find one that is what I"m looking for I'd like to probably just purchase it from adobe at the end of my trial. Problem is.. I'm not sure which program I need!

 

[KmH]

You would do better on a forum dealing with web site development and maintanence. Like W3Schools Forum (Powered by Invision Power Board)

This is a photography forum.

 

[Aayria]

Thanks for the link - I will check it out. I was posting here, because this is at least a forum community I've grown familiar with, and I know there are photographers here who are also responsible for their buisiness websites.

With that in mind, I thought this might be a good starting place as well, considering that I value the opinions and experience of the other photographers here.

 

[dak1b]

web design forums for designers to website design

 

[Boomn4x4]

I do plenty of web development, I'm a computer programmer by trade.

In my personal opinion, your best approach will be to use a Content Management System (CMS) coupled with an open source photo album software package. All of it can be free.

A CMS is a software package that is installed on your server. It gives you a graphical interface to simplifying your website and updating the content on it. You don't need to know much of anything in the terms of coding to run the site. But a word of warning, there is a reasonable learning curve to picking it up to figure out how to do it. If you have time to play with it, and the patience to read online documentation and follow technical documents, then this would be right up your alley. Once you learn how to do it, there really isn't much you cannot do with it and you'll never need to type a single line of code.

I have set up a half a dozen or so website using this method, and the owners of the websites do all the updating themselves. www.ohiowaterfowl.org www.waterfowlersbootcamp.com www.quackerattacker.net www.foulobesssionoutfitters.com are a few that I know of off the top of my head if you want to take a look at them.

The CMS I use is called "Joomla". www.joomla.org

For doing photography, the best I have come across so far is an open source program called "jAlbum". www.jalbum.net Jalbum is a localy installed program that you install on your desktop. The program alows gives you a GUI to setup an album with tons of options, the program then creates all of the html code, files, and thumbnails. You then upload those to your websever and link to the album and your users can browse, even buy, your photos. www.waterfowlchat.com/Snow_goose_2010/index.html is an example of a very basic album I created... When I say basic, this is about as simple as you can make an album.