Personally I like Wordpress + Gallery. Nice clean interface and well integrated. I am not a pro, but I use it for my personal site here. Mine is not customized at all. It could be done in a much more personalized way.
I use xanga which i have been very happy with until recently. They are good but if you check my blog at www.chrisfawkes.com you will also note that is has those obnoxious popup window viewers appear everytime you go over a link.
If xanga don't get rid of them or show me how to switch them off so they don't come up for my clients then i will change.
Otherwise they are good and excellent for networking with other photographers.
dholoski wrote:
Personally I like Wordpress + Gallery. Nice clean interface and well integrated. I am not a pro, but I use it for my personal site here. Mine is not customized at all. It could be done in a much more personalized way.
Not a good blogger, but created one because folks have been complaining that my automotive articles were hard to read. (I scan them off the magazine I write for and post them on my gallery ) To keep it simple I use google blog.
Pixelpost is one of the most popular, and it is fairly easy to set up and maintain. Some people prefer WordPress and MovableType, which are both blog engines but not necessarily turnkey photoblogs. Every software mentioned on this thread so far requires you to have server space capable of handling PHP database support, which can be a little more difficult and costly for the novice user (I'm somewhere around "intermediate" and I still have trouble using Pixelpost to its full capability without a little elbow grease). There are also a number of free online photoblog softwares such as Aminus3, Tumblr, and Google Pages. But most free online blogs don't allow total customization. They might have a number of color and style templates if that suits you.
Flickr is also a nice way to show images and it can be turned into a photoblog with a little imagination. It's also free for a base level account.
Another vote for Wordpress. Also Wordpress is FREE and gives your free 3GB of hosting. Yes FREE. It is pretty easy to customize if you know a little bit of HTML. I tried both Blogspot and Wordpress and Wordpress easily blows the competition away in terms of hosting a PhotoBlog.
My blog is here. Let me know if you want to know how any of those articles were made in the blog or through it's semi customized HTML code.
I just got a wordpress blog set up. Using a script I found on line it was a simple matter of uploading the php file to my folder using FTP, then going to the script in my browser. It downloaded the latest wordpress version, asked for my user ID, email, etc and I was done. Sooooo easy. Very customizable and lots of help and developers making great new tools and eye candy.
I poked around for about an hour and decided on Blogger (which I think is Google now). I picked a template then went in the HTML and made edits. It was fairly simple if you know HTML (change table sizes et al). I liked it because I could host it on my own site (blog.onyourmarkphoto.com) where it would actually store all the pages to help reinforce the URL name.
Now, I'm using it as a "I just did an event, here's a shot or two, and here's more information" type of thing, not a full photo-blog. That's all I really needed.
Oh, and I was debating the whole blog thing for a while, but decided to try it, and figured if it didn't work out, I'd delete it. Well... my blog is now tops in several search strings on Google ("event name" photos, "event name", etc.) and I have seen about 2-3 people driven to my site based on searches that hit the blog. I did this to help those who remember the name of the event, but lost my card so they don't know where the photos are. It seems to be working so far.
Another "thumbs-up" on the blog from me. I got an order from someone who Googled "event name photography" and--thanks to my blog entry about shooting that event--found my site and placed an order.
I think I'm going to have to do a trilogy of posts for all future events:
1) A "going to be shooting this event" post
2) A "just got back shooting the event" post
3) A "here's some shots from the event" post
Plus, every time I mention my company's name, I use it as a link to the website. That reinforces my name in the search engines.
) To keep it simple I use google blog.