Photography Website Options

By Adrian Klein

Recently I put together a new photography website. I have had a number of people ask about it. Did I build it? Did I use a template service? Is it custom? Today there many options available that makes the process fairly painless for a pretty robust site. Building and maintaining my own site from scratch, is something I stopped doing about seven years ago when I was just starting to turn photography into a business. Here is the homepage to that site.

Although I had fun coding, using Dreamweaver WYSIWYG and designing the interactive pieces like roll-over images the website functionally was rapidly changing and it was more than I wanted to do on my own.

This was around 2007 and although there were template website services available they greatly lacked personalization with limited configuration. It was not hard to go to a photography website and know exactly which template program it was built with. I went down this road out of convenience.  The first solution I had (which will remain nameless since I am not out slam any company) was one of the worst I have done business with ever. It gave me a bad taste and I almost went back to creating my own. Fast forward to 2013 and I have used several options bringing me to what I use at this moment.

As you likely know the options available today is like an endless sea. I know there are many other solutions than I list here yet I cannot cover them all. Additionally the solutions of today are quite robust with a wide range of configuration options to keep it from looking identical to every other website.

The first step is to figure out what options and features are most important to you. I made a list of must haves, some I was not getting with my past website company.

• Mobile and tablet friendly
• Ability for users to search images based on keywords
• Easy to use administration site
• Not Flash
• No transaction fee for using shopping cart system
• Good customer service when I have questions

Here are options I recently explored or have had in the past and my thoughts on them.

Livebooks: This is the solution I recently left after a couple years.
What I liked…

• Excellent customer service
• Easy to use site administration
• Very clean cut looking templates

What I am not a big fan of…

• Flash website (although they did have built in iPhone and iPad websites included)
• $39 a month. That amount is not expensive yet I feel it was for what I was getting
• Not a very good shopping cart system for buying prints
• Tried to move to their new platform and had trouble getting images to show in a size I wanted.

PhotoShelter: This is one I researched and there seems to be a lot of options especially for the photographer that has many many images to sell as stock. I could see possibly using them in the future.

What I liked…

• Their built in search functionality looks very robust with the ability to select only verticals or horizontals as one example.
• Nice built in shopping cart system for either licensing images or selling prints
• Many different template options to choose from
• Reasonable pricing options

What I am not a big fan of…

• The biggest thing that stopped me in my tracks was the percentage fee of each print or license I would sell through the site. I am glad to pay $30 or $40 a month for a solution but with that I want the option to self-fulfill orders and not pay a fee.

Jimdo: I currently use this one for the workshop Northwest Photo Tours website. It’s a good option especially for those that are not very tech savvy.

What I liked…

• One of the most user friendly site administration back-end I have come across.
• Pricing from free to business plans

What I am not a big fan of…

• The mobile site has the same look and feel for all customers with very few options to configure
• The shopping cart system did not look like it would work as well for selling photos if you want the user to browse on place (e.g. separate galleries from online store)

SmugMug: I admit I did not check them out this time around but I had a few years back and their site configuration was anything but intuitive. I understand talking with a few others at the time that people having built their own site prior to using SmugMug were finding their admin layout confusing as well.

Maybe they have changed this and if so I will check them out again down the road. They certainly have a great following which includes several Photo Cascadia members using them as well; Zack Schnepf, Kevin McNeal and Chip Phillips.

Zenfolio: This brings me to the final site solution I will talk about. This was the company I ultimately picked for my latest photography website incarnation.

What I liked…

• Well pretty much everything. It met all my requirements. I have been quite happy with the usability of administering the site, the quick responses on questions and more.

What I am not a big fan of…

• After reading many reviews it was only after I built most of my site did I come across a number of comments listing Zenfolio lower in the SEO category than say its competitor SmugMug. I will give it chance though and see how it pans out.

Custom:

I guess this one option to mention which does cover the site you are on right now. Photo Cascadia is a custom solution from Dot Com Jungle as well as Sean Bagshaw’s site. David Cobb also has  If you are willing to spend $5,000+ then you can certainly get a good custom solution built for you. I half way thought about this. If it was 2006 and we had less than stellar template sites then I would do it. Since there are a lot of other good options out there it’s hard to pass up $20 to $30 a month of a pretty robust template solution site.

What solution do you use and why?