I'm not sure if this is the forum to ask this question, but here goes. Where can I go to start up a website that will be either free or lost cost without having to spend alot off money to create a website to display my photographs. I have had no luck and don't know where to begin and I hope I can find some answers here in this forum. Thank you in advance for those who are trying to help out.
You may wish to review www.smugmug.com. I believe it has a free trial period, too.
Relatively low cost, and fairly simple to use. I subscribe to it, and like that I can display my images in large size for better viewing. I've yet to explore all its options.
It has a handy upload utility that lets you upload images direct from your hardrive to your selected gallery.
Thank you for the input. I know creating a website is sometimes difficult and I'm not computer savy, but I just want one to display my work and be user friendly. Thank you again for the input, I'll check them both out.
Vistaprint also has low cost web site hosting with a ton of design options and three levels costwise that allow different bandwidths. If you are going to create a serious business site you must consider bandwidth especially if you will be posting high res pictures. Here is a link to my website on vistaprint. It is the lowest cost version yet has many features and an easy to use dashboard for building your site.
www.dbic-inc.com
BTW - I own the dbic-inc domain name and have it registered at my domain dot com. This allows me to set up my website on any hosting server without caring about the domain name and other stuff. I just do a stealth link to it from mydomain and it looks like it is my domain name transparently. This also lets me change hosting sites with ease and still retain my domain name and url address on my stationary and cards.
I will also recommend a very simple yet full featured flash solution
J-Album http://jalbum.net/
and fotoplayer skin. http://www.fotoplayer.com/
Both are free and can be used for your enitre site. A small amount of html knowledge is required but easy enough to muddle through.
I believe it requires domain name and hosting site but I think J-Album as a very inexpenseive solution for that.
JUst another option.
Steve
I have been using j-album for a few months. It was flaky at first but with this last round of updates it seems to run smoother. There are a few quirks that I don't like. You have to keep your source files in one spot or risk losing your album if you move a folder...it doesn't search for file names. This caused me quite a bit of trouble as I am used to creating and deleting folders on my desktop for one time use. You have to create a more permanent destination for your source folder.
I am going to try smugmug for a little bit, then decide which one I want to use.
Steve lamothe wrote:
I will also recommend a very simple yet full featured flash solution
J-Album http://jalbum.net/
and fotoplayer skin. http://www.fotoplayer.com/
Both are free and can be used for your enitre site. A small amount of html knowledge is required but easy enough to muddle through.
I believe it requires domain name and hosting site but I think J-Album as a very inexpenseive solution for that.
JUst another option.
Steve
Another member posted a thread titled "web site naming". I gave a more complete answer to him than I gave here. This is what I posted on the other thread.
Naming a business, and its website, can be a very personal thing. I will try to give you some tips but I won't suggest actual names.
1 - You are right about simple and easy. My e-mail is ****-Inc@*******.net and my website is www.****-Inc.com. Both the same and since the real website name (not **** by the way) is actually the short form name of my business name they are relevant and memorable. However you have to be pretty creative or have a pretty unique business name to stay simple nowadays. FYI - I am not showing my real site name here because it is not related to photography but to industrial engineering and consulting.
2 - When you consider that there are many good hosting sites you may want to do what I did. I didn't want my domain name tied to any particular site so I could take it with me to a new hosting site if I needed to. So I went to mydomain dot com and registered my domain name there. Then when I did set up my web site I didn't care what it was called on their server. All I had to do is go back to mydomain dot com and do what is known as a stealth forward. Let me give you an example. Say my domain name that I own on mydomain dot com is sassy.com (other extensions like org and edu are also available) but I set up my web page on vistaprint and named it yackety yack.com. The stealth forward function lets me, and my potential customers, go the sassy.com and end up at yackety yack.com without ever seeing the stupid yackety yack.com name. If you then decide at some point in the future to change hosting sites from vistaprint to some other host all you have to do is go back to mydomain dot com and change the stealth forwarding pointer to the new web site name and nothing else, like your business cards and flyers, has to be changed. This is much easier than trying to move a website to a new server and trying to take your name with you from the old server. And in the case of vistaprint all their names have this format "www.sassy.vpweb.com. Obviously you cannot take that whole name with you to another host server.
3 - At mydomain dot com you can also do searches for names similar to what you want that are still available. And you can, if you find that the name you really want is taken, make an offer to the current owner of the name to buy it from him through this website - http://www.buydomains.com/
4 - As to the hosting servers, there are many good hosting sites now with some very good features for a low cost per month. Vistaprint, for example, has three package levels and the top one is still pretty low cost with nearly unlimited bandwidth and a ton of features you can build into your page from the dashboard. It is no longer neccessary to have a professional design your site to get a good looking one with all the features like slide shows and many others thrown in.
5 - Mydomain dot com also has the ability to post metatags and a meta description to help you get hits from search engines. Just another reason to use it or a domain name site like it. ...Show more →
Thank you all who responded. I have checked out what everyone listed and all of them are great sites. I just have to pick out the one that will work for me. Again, much thanks to all of you.
