It seems most photography hosting services want about $100-150 a year for the professional level service that allows you to sell prints and a few other features. Then another $10-20 a year for the address. And then how much to get someone who knows what they're doing to put together the actual web design and code? Any costs I'm missing?

 

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i know a few acfers and other vn ppl use deviantART

is that one not really a good one for you?

 

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It really depends what you are looking to do with your website. If you want to a host that does sales for you then you have to find something like smugmug, photoshelter, etc and that costs quite a bit more than building and hosting a site yourself. If you are just looking for a site to host your images and services you can build one yourself for much, much cheaper. You can build a wordpress based site for simply the cost of the domain + the hosting, or even host it on wordpress.com for free with a custom domain.

So are you looking for a host that provides a storefront? are you looking for simply a gallery? How big is your theoretical audience of viewers?

I used photoshelter about 6-7 months ago and while i didn't have any problems with their hosting i really didn't do enough sales through their site to justify the higher cost. A lot of parents that wanted to buy action prints didn't want to use paypal with their credit cards and preferred to pay with cash. If I did more events than I was doing I would have considered staying with them but for how little I was making it wasn't worth it.

I briefly did a wordpress template based site before going with a flash template from intothedarkroom. So far I am pretty happy with it.

 

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I don't think deviantArt lets you put up your own website design. Right now I'm exploring the ideal option and want to be able to fully customize the layout and content to my needs, desires, and whims. I may end up going with something like deviant Art...





Yea, I would like an automated storefront. I'm open to other ideas, but mainly I'd rather be free to just worry about the content and let someone else handle the orders, shipping, and billing.

At this point, my theoretical audience of viewers is zero. I'm mainly just playing with the idea for now and may at some point jump into it if I think I can count on breaking even...

 

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In that case the major popular options are Smugmug, Photoshelter, and Zenfolio. If you look around on the web you can usually find a decent discount code for all of them, especially depending on how far ahead you decide to subscribe for. Photoshelter was the most costly when I was looking but it took the smallest cut of your sales of the sites I looked at and had pretty good options for prints from places like adorama. I think Zenfolio gives you the option of Mpix and that is awesome. Whatever site you decide on I would still recommend getting your own domain name, most of these sites let you use your own domain instead of soandso.smugmug.com which seems tacky and unprofessional.

All of them claim to be SEO friendly and easy to use so it just comes down to finding one that has templates you like, decent price, decent storage and has options to print from labs you like. Sign up for a free trial with any of the above and see if you like how it works, you usually can't see images during the trial but it may be enough to decide which you do or don't like.

 

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Take a look at Redbubble. It's a free image hosting site with store front and it gives you your own page (it has three themes to choose from, which is better than none ), as an example, here's my old (not been updated for years) bubble site:

http://shalis.redbubble.com/

It's a great starter site and as mentioned, free.

 

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I used GoDaddy.com and got my URL + hosting for a total of $60 and that covers 2yrs.

Did you do your own web design?

 

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Originally I did but then after messing around with wordpress a bit I found a template that I could implement very easy so switched to that since I wanted the comments portion of wordpress.

I used smugmug for the last year.

http://www.jupitersnapshots.com/

But 150 was not worth it.

The site is really nice but you need a ton of buyers for it to make any sense.

Photobucket seems easy to use and works well enough for now (just to share pics etc).


Been talking about doing photo shoots with friends lately (this evening actually).

Been through a few photo shoots with families but want to get 3-5 more free ones under my belt before I go to the general public.

Rough idea is the charge $300 for a 2 site photo shoot (they choose from a list of local sites).

They get get the entire shoot on a CD or Flash Drive (less than 5 bucks for either).

Then they get to choose 10 pics for me to do post shot work on and I email them back the files.

They are in charge of printing unless they want me to do it for more money.

Basically thats the idea (also to get the word out Id advertise a April special for $100 off the price).

/shrug

Tons of people in Jupiter would snap this deal up (tons of money and nothing to buy)