I've been using prophoto 2 for a while now with my blog as my sole web presence. I've debated on adding a full website or upgrading to prophoto3 and using it as a wordpress based full website. I know some of you guys here are already doing this, just looking for input, thoughts in general, especially those of you who are doing this. It would be great to see some examples too, so please post your www if you are doing this!
ProPhoto 2 and 3 are really nice templates to develop into full "blogsites". If you have the know-how, you can augment the template to fit your needs very well. Making it into a site really isn't that hard at all - just add static pages and fill them in with content. I made mine with version 2 then upgraded to version 3 and everything transferred over. Version 3's slideshow feature is really nice for any portfolio type pages you might want to make. However if you have something like Zenfolio that already allows for embeddable slideshows, it's not THAT important. Though, between the two versions, there aren't really that many significant changes that would make one better than the other at making a complete site - it's easy accomplished with both.
Darryl funny you should ask this as I just started a prophoto 3 blog and can easily see it being the only web presence you'll need. Very easy to get up and running and you can pretty much get it to do & look any way you want. Right now I have three websites (including the WP blog) and plan on combining everything into the one WP blogsite. Take a quick look at Tony Hoffer's blog as a great example.
Here's mine, just 5 days old so still very much a work in progress:
www.mikemahoney.ca/blog
My take on it is that I wanted to keep things really simple for my clients. I don't want two photo sites, or a bunch of bells and whistles that add load time and bloat. I definitely wanted to stay away from Flash altogether, so for me ProPhoto 3 is a pretty good fit.
All that said, I know tons of photogs with great Flash sites. I just didn't think that's where I wanted to go. Good luck. Also, if you are cultivating clients in several areas of photography (wedding and commercial for instance), having a separate portfolio site might make good sense.
Hey sharpeshots, I just did the very thing you are talking about and it is working out well for me. I ditched my flash website that I never updated and went with a prophoto 3 blogsite. I'm getting a whole bunch more traffic since it is SEO friendly and the content is getting updated. I've got a long long long way to go to build it out with all my pics but it has been a good investment in time already for me. The biggest thing between prophoto 2 and 3 for me is the batch uploading of pics which saves a HUGE amount of time. I'm not that big into the slideshow/flash stuff since I've been working on SEO and the blog with just pics is way better for that. You can look at my site at www.bluewavephotoweddings.com and I would appreciate any constructive comments anyone has to offer on anything on the site.
thanks for the feedback guys, my main reason to upgrade would be for the flash slideshows, i've used a bunch of 3rd party ones and they're all terrible and especially buggy.
