Hello all,
I want to make a web site to diplay some of my photos. Would be glad if someone can give me some pointers. I used to have a one when I was in grad school and I wrote the whole thing in HTML. I dont think people do that any more.
Are there free software people use to create nice sites? This is not for a business purpose so dont want to spend a lot. I just to display my images and I dont like photobucket's interface and they compress the files I think.
Also where do you guys host your sites?
Thanks.

 

i always had problems finding just the right tool to make my site, i was never really good at html, site layout, or flash. so i have tried it all word press, coppermine, and nothing gave me the real professional look i wanted.

last year some time i saw Alex's (Poindexter) site on smug mug and really liked the look that he had. after a lot of reading on their forums and a trial account i found that it was my best option. now when i do client work i'm not worried about others seeing the work until the client signs off on. and i get a lot of positive feedback from my users on the layout of the site.


www.jcox3.net

www.smugmug.com

 

Thanks a lot Jcox3

 

Pixelpost is a small open source app that I've fallen in love with. http://www.pixelpost.org/

It's completely open so there are dozens of themes and addons. I use the Dark Matter theme here: http://www.aaroncopley.com/photoblog/

I haven't updated in a while though, because Flickr is just so easy...

 

Keep the flash to a minimum and if you use music remember not everyone likes it. Those two items are also bandwidth hogs. I used a combination of lightbox and wordpress for mine.

It I think is simple and effective along with being easy to modify and upload new shots to. Now all i have to do is update my photos yeah someday....

I host with globat.

 

As a web developer by day, I prefer straight html, css, javascript and php myself. Flash still tends to limit your users as updates still are automated in Firefox and many users don't like (or know how) to download the update and install it themselves.

A few more pointers;

1) Don't put things in front of your image. It has become a trend lately that people put "buttons" in front of their image to go to the next and previous image. This idea first came from another brilliant idea, clicking the image to go to the next, this gives the user a big target (good) and they won't have to move their mouse (good). If you put an image button in front when doing this though, you have now defeated the advantages. Now the user must click the image to go to the next one (still good) but then must move their mouse out of the image area to view the image by itself (not good).

2) Don't put the image too far down the page. Sometimes people get carried away with designing their menus/headers/banners/etc, and the image gets pushed part of the way down the page. You want your images to be visible in full without having to scroll down, there are few things more annoying and time consuming than having to scroll down to see the full image after every time you click next image.

3) Create your web page for the lowest user you'd expect at your sight. Before this was mainly a concern of connection speed, and while that is still partly true, it is less of a concern. Music and flash are still killers here, but you don't have to convert all images to web colors etc (though it doesn't hurt if done right). This also means resolution, create your page to be viewable by the average viewer. Typical screen resolution is 1280x1024, but the average user does not maximize their browser, so make it for a lower res to make life easier on more viewers.

Currently my website is a fairly poor example as it was originally created as a coding test of a menu system, but a new version is on the way and will be much improved.

Good luck and have fun with it.

 

Hey man I want to compliment you on your site. It's simple and clean. Looks good.

I'm going to look into using smugmug. Do you know if it let's you change the pricing for the prints?

 

I still write all my html on notepad :-)

Keep it simple and clean, very important.

Good luck..!

 

yes you can fully customize the pricing, all the way down to just what its costs smugmug to print them $.28 for a 8x10 to what ever you want to charge. they then pay you depending on how much you made, i think over $500 is a check every month, under $250 is every quarter, and below $100 you have to request it.

and there customer service is great is there are any issues with the prints.