How did you design your Web site?

[Carol Chan]

Just browsing through the photographers directory and was amazed at the quality of all the web sites. How do you all design such beautiful sites? My web skills are rotten. Do you pay someone to come up with the designs?

[zemlin]

Here's one that will make you feel better
ZemlinPhoto
I will be updating it, but you know how that goes in the real world ... sometime ... maybe ... when I run out of other things to do ...
I would not recommend starting off with several negative statements, and then asking for work - like I do.

[korman]

Originally Posted by Carol Chan

My web skills are rotten.

No need for web skill.

First have good content.
Then organise it in an expected way so that a visitor will find what he's looking for without much thinking.
Last make the design unobtrusive and discreet.
If you feel the need for cute gimmicks, select only one for the whole site and make sure it isn't annoying.

That's all you need for a decent web-site. As a photographer you should have a minimum of ideas about visual impact and what colour scheme goes best with your content, so that excuse doesn't really count either.

Korman

[Brenda Read]

I did my main photography website by old fashion way. Writing the code.

Take a look at blogger.com it's totally free.

Here are a couple of my blogger.com blogs:
Houston Sports Photographer Brenda Read
Photographer Brenda Read Reviews Nikon Cameras & Gear

There are a ton of companies that make online products just for developing sites for photographers.

liveBooks - home - editable websites and online marketing tools for photographers is very popular.

[Rense]

I have a standard smugmug setup.
For my partner in live, I adapted a template from Idimager, see for the results here.

[mcbit]

Outside of Smugmug and PBase I use an open source content manager called Joomla which is easy to use and has available a huge amount of free modules including some very professional image galleries.

Here is my sausage website made with Joomla which I think is pretty OK for a first attempt.

[Rense]

Originally Posted by mcbit

Outside of Smugmug and PBase I use an open source content manager called Joomla which is easy to use and has available a huge amount of free modules including some very professional image galleries.

Here is my sausage website made with Joomla which I think is pretty OK for a first attempt.

OT: you are scottish? Any quilt images?

[mcbit]

Originally Posted by Rense

OT: you are scottish?....as far as I know
Any quilt images? ........

[mcbit]

......Aaaahh! ..... Kilt??

Nope!

[Rense]

yes kilt (sorry I'm just awake, didn't have coffee yet and a lot of champagne yesterday evening).

[CanadianRocky]

It is not a photography website, but this is how I did my business one.

I know very little about code, so I use an Web WYSIWYG application. (What you see is what you get). They are very limiting but it would work for the simple website I wanted.

Then I found a website I liked, and used it as inspiration for the design.

But the key thing is that no matter how nice it is, it has to be seen to get its point across.

The most important thing I did, was to hire someone who knows Internet marketing to proof the website and help with the wording so it could be found with searching. This is the talent part. He was able to take me from obscurity into the top 5 hits on the first page with the type of searching someone would be using to find my type of business.

Then you sign on with a stats counter and start to watch how people find you. Once you see how people search for you, you can start to change your message.

Total cost for my website including software and editing was under $500.

I had a few quotes on getting it done professionally. The least expensive one was four times that, and they all wanted to make me this wiz bang website which would have been great, except that none of them understood my target market.

My website is in my profile.

[NikonMarty]

we ordered a couple of templates from Blu and just added what images/color scheme/music we wanted...added another link recently to a blog we purchased as well
besides a few hours of "working" on our internet presence we spent maybe $400

[Jon Foster]

Dreamweaver is the industry standard for websites. There are also tons of templates you can buy to get started if you don't want to do the initial setup yourself. Using CSS is a good option too. It's a great way to standardize your layout and keep everything optimized for search engines.

I do sites for small businesses and use templates most of the time now to cut working time and costs. Of course having said all that, my sites are either 10 plus years old (and showing it) or I haven't even done more than add a basic page saying the new site will be online soon.

Jon.

[drkranger]

I too wrote my own website and added the things I wanted. It took a lot of time and I'm sure it could be made better.

Recently, I changed my blog to wordpress and have been completely blown away at the templates and options available with that program. I could see moving my whole site to that design and just using it's built in editors and tools to create a solid webpage.

Take a look at the downloadable software at wordpress.org. You can also have a site hosted using their online site at wordpress.com. The templates offered are incredible.

[DanInSoCal]

I found some free templates online (Googled something like "free website template") and highly modified one that I found appealing.

For my gallery software, I used ZenPhoto. It was quite customizable.

Check out Dan Gehlhaar Photography

Regards,
Dan

[ah-photography]

I just did mine in iWeb which comes with the Mac - I spend far too much time with IT during the day to be bothered with anything too Flash (some kind of pun intended)

[TheRoaddog]

I used WebStudio4.0 from Back to the Beach Software. 'Costs about $80. You be the judge.
Timepiece Photo Services, Montross, Va.
There's a busted page, but th' rest is... there.
RD

[CanadianRocky]

Originally Posted by TheRoaddog

I used WebStudio4.0 from Back to the Beach Software. 'Costs about $80. You be the judge.
Timepiece Photo Services, Montross, Va.
There's a busted page, but th' rest is... there.
RD

I used the same program.

Rocky Mountain Pro Drivers Home

[Photosus]

This is my website.

I used wordpress which is free and I designed it by making my own template out of some software called Artiseer which costs around 50 USD. Artisteer is really easy to use.

I have also recently begun using JAlbum to generate my webshop photoalbums. But in this case I bought another template and had to change quite a bit in the code to get it to look exactly like the rest of my website.