Website
 

Hi All. I have offten thought about having my own website, but not sure where to start. Any ideas?

Ian P

Ian,

It would be a good idea if you thought about what you want from your website to begin with.

What sort of content do you want on this website? Are you planning on using your webspace provided by your ISP? What do you want to do with your site?

Start by deciding on what you want your site to contain.

What yelvertoft says. You have to decide what the site is meant to do. Depending on that you might chose to get your own domain and hosting site and run your own show, or use some provider like smugmug or one of the blogging services like wordpress.

I have my own website which began to showcase my images. Throughout my photography development I uploaded photos to various sites which can attract attention. My website now informs any customer a little but about me. It is therefore advertising my previous achievements and what I can do for a potential customer.

I moved to the Apple Mac computer platform two years ago and I get mail and a website bundled so the site costs nothing extra that what I would pay for mail and other 'virtual' services from Apple.

The site is made using iWeb on the mac and while some hate the application I find it very easy and quick to manage the site.

Site Here

I alot to think about. I would like to show case my photos, i guess i need to take on all comments from all of you.

Thank you very much all.

Ian P

Hi Ian
If you just want a simple website to show case your photos, You could start with clickpic
It is a good starting point,you could use it to give you a idea of what you need from a website. I think a few WPF members started with clickpic then moved on to make their own sites.

Website
 

Thank you for this Lello. will have a look at clickpic.

Ian P

Not sure what you mean by 'Showcase' I assume you mean something to get noticed. In which case it is worth remembering that there is a huge number of sites out there. A number of people use the photo based social networking sites like ipernity, zoomr, or flickr.

Flickr is the dominant one as it gets most of the eyeballs, and has some nifty searching facilities. Remember though that there are over 5,000 photos being uploaded to that site each minute. So you have to work on the social aspects of the site to build up a following etc.

My photos are linked to from Universities, biologists, government, and UN sites, and I've had requests to license from a number of commercial organizations (though I always refuse such requests).

As a result of the academic links my flickr pages tend to come up fairly high in the google rankings, and I get somewhere in the region of 2000 hits a week.

OTOH the recent photo-blog I started gets around 30 hits a week:

http://professor-moriarty.com/moriar...land_churches/

might be the subject matter though.

I would make your own site and use RedBubble.com , Deviantart.com and flickr in conjunction with your site, like I have done. (www.gfinch.net) I put my images on all those sites and get feedback from a variety of artists. The best thing you can do it to show off your images as much as possible to get noticed.

I know a few people who could host sites for you, for a small fee. They'll set them up as well and possibly make them for you. PM me if you're interested.

its always good to have a blog rather than a forum as it is very easy to maintain, if you are a busy person

i think if your not really into coding etc then joomla is the way to go

Thank You for your advice.

Ian

you should have a portfolio website, as it is easiest way to show your work to the entire world.

but you should remember that this website should have unique domain name as it is necessary for the security and privacy of your work..

Hi Dilshad. Thank you for your advice.

Ian P

Hi Ian

Websites do not have to be daunting at all realy, firstly decide wether you want to pay for it or you want it for free!

If you opt for a free site then you will encounter advertising on your site from other parties or and you may find you have waved your rights to your content also so please read the terms and conditions properly.
A domain name and hosting of your own site can be from as little as £40 a year now which will give you full control of your content.

If you go down the road of having your own site and domain i would suggest at first you do not go down the content management road ie joomla etc but simply install a html homepage then link off to a gallery package this will be far easier for you to control you keywords and meta tags "these are how people searching find you" because using a featured content site like joomla etc can be difficult to find your meta tags and keywords which will all be set to advertise the joomla engine services, they are great to have and use once you have learned a bit about site building etc but at first to the novice can be a nightmare.

Just my view and hope it help you out.

Thanks for the advice Gaz.

Ian

I prefer to have my own website than use free services for sure.... i like to controll the media :-)

Some time ago I had an argument with one website over the there use of embedding images onto their travel site. It ended with them being adamant that inline linking and framing wasn't a copyright violation and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

So I framed their site and they in turn sent a take down notice claiming that the framing was a copyright infringement. Since then I've removed the framing of the site and replaced it with a text description of the argument (the site went titsup anyway). You can see what I did here:
http://spark-in-the-ashes.net/assholes/

Everything can happen... actually there is abig debate in framing... I hate frames now but my web used frames for years.