I've had a photography site with Photoshelter since 2010 but am now becoming disillusioned with their site and am looking for alternatives. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for a photography website platform.
I'm a hobbyist so my primary goal is nice templates and good SEO support. Although I don't sell photos now I would like the ability to do so in case I want to do that in the future - at a minimum a shopping cart and payment integration is important. Direct integration with printing companies is a plus, but not a requirement.
Unfortunately building a new site will be a ton of work, but on the plus side it will force me to reevaluate my old images something I never seem to get around to.
I am hoping to narrow down the options to the ones that people here like. If you don't mind I would love to see a link to your website as well. Sometimes seeing what someone has created with the platform is really helpful.
For the photo blog, I use the self-hosted Wordpress platform (not Wordpress.com) with a highly customisable theme from Pro.Photo available at https://pro.photo
Squarespace is something that has been coming up in my own searches frequently as a good sitebuilder with good SEO. It looks great, but I wasn't sure if the lack of focus on Photography was an issue. Petapixel had an article on how they stripped copyright info in May 2020, and it looks like it took them 2 years to fix this. Hopefully all is well now and it's good to see a recommendation here so I will spend more time on it and may give the free trial a go. I also like that I can pay for an personal account and then upgrade to a business plan if I decide to put something for sale.
Photofolio and your website look great! I like the photography focus and they appear to provide good support which is a big plus when things go wrong. However, they are priced higher than I want to spend as a hobbyist so I'll probably look for another site for now. Thanks also for the info on doing the blog. This is something I need to work more on so this will be good info for the future.
It's been years since I last looked at Zenfolio. Their templates and your website looks very nice. I will give them a closer look.
Lara_F wrote:
Squarespace is something that has been coming up in my own searches frequently as a good sitebuilder with good SEO. It looks great, but I wasn't sure if the lack of focus on Photography was an issue.
I've primarily used them to build client photo galleries but you can also build a photo-centric website with them that I believe will support online sales. I've only briefly looked at this and started building something, but have not published it due to other more pressing matters. At the moment I just have my url redirect to a handful of Pixieset photo galleries. I had been using a hosting platform and had built my own site using their Wordpress templates, but they kept changing things and some formerly free options were monitized. So what I built became very old and Wordpress updates broke things, so I've pretty much mothballed it (it was mostly a blog format). Going forward I'm leaning towards solutions like Squarespace or Pixieset where they maintain all the backend stuff you don't have to worry about and just use their templates to build something you like. Another one I had looked at a while ago was format.com, but have not checked them recently. Maybe it's an option?
I'd like to know what you don't like about Photoshelter's options? It was another option I was considering since I've used them for a long time but never really made good use of their service.
Thanks for the Squarespace site references - very professional looking sites and it was very helpful seeing what they did with them. None of the sites have all of their stock photos for sale. Some have other things like calendars or books for sale. A couple of sites have selected images for print sale. It seems to be a little bit different than the Photoshelter approach where you can price and put all of your images for sale. Not necessarily bad - just a different approach.
Thanks for the reference to pixieset - I haven't heard of this before. Nice that you can use it for free to start with so you can see if it will do what you want before you have to commit to it.
As far as Photoshelter goes, I think it offers a lot with their templates and features. Several years ago they were really good at SEO. However I've had some issues with it now. Earlier this year I discovered that much of my site isn't indexed by Google. I have a technical background so I narrowed down the issue to the sitemap and eventually got them to fix it. After thinking it was fixed I decided to check Google a few months later and found out my pages are erroring when they are indexed. It took several back and forth with support to get them to escalate the issue. I found out today they are working on a fix. If they make a fix soon then they are at least being responsive, but it took a lot of my time to troubleshoot this and get them to believe it was an issue. I feel like making sure their pages work with Google should be a priority and it concerns me that they didn't find these issues on their own.
Take another look at Photofolio. You can easily change the design of your website whenever you want, support is exceptional and they're always coming out with new features. The cost may seem steep (for the upfront cost) but my guess is if you figure of what another site will cost you over a year or two, you'll come out ahead with Photofolio. You can also embed fotomoto into the site if you want to sell images; you can set up private, password protected galleries for that, too, if you want. (No, I don't work for them, just a happy customer).
You might consider having somebody build you a site with Wordpress, but NOT on Wordpress.com. If you have a site built with open source Wordpress, you can install (and/or have custom built) whatever plugins you need in the future to support the e-commerce functions. There are also a couple photography plugins that might work for you out of the box, the most noteable being Imagely's NextGen gallery.
It's important to distinguish between "Wordpress.com" and "Wordpress.org" sites. Wordpress.com is a SaaS platform. Yes, it runs Wordpress, but they're in control of the code you get to run. "Wordpress.org" means that you're having Wordpress installed on a shared hosting server, or on a server of your own, and therefore you're in complete control of what code you run, so you have complete freedom in terms of themes and plugins.
Technically speaking, you could build your own Wordpress site for free, and you'd just have the monthly cost of hosting. Though, unless you have design and development experience, you may be better off having a developer build it for you, even if it's just an Indian or Filipino doing it on Fiverr for $50 - that would at least get you by with something workable. A real developer that acutally cares about your project will be $3000+, and if you do have any custom plugins built, you'll want them on retainer to update and maintain that code.
Photofolio does look nice and I appreciate the 2nd recommendation especially the good support and frequent updates. I will keep it on my list, especially if some of the cheaper options don't pan out.
I appreciate the suggestion on wordpress/plugins. I thought about using wordpress for a blog for years, but never got around to it. With so many good relatively cheap gallery platforms out there I don't think a custom solution makes sense for me - too much time/money especially once updates are factored in.
One site that hasn't been mentioned that looks promising is Format.com If anyone has any experience with that site I would appreciate your comments.
I'm a hobbyist/enthusiast as well and have found squarespace to provide a reliable platform to share some of my images with friends and family along with an occasional buyer. I've been with them for a few years. Just be aware that if you want to change themes after your initial set up, you pretty much have to start over with the customizations - but they make it fairly easy.
I use pixieset and I’ve been very pleased with it for my uses. It’s very easy and quick to get it up and running. My customers have no issues downloading their photos, accessing their galleries and purchasing from my stores. The client management part has really gotten a lot of updates (as has the whole site really, seems they add something nearly monthly).
I have no plans on switching.
www.Andymeadephotography.com if you want to see the layout I am using.
@AMD300 - beautiful site - very professional and well done. Pixiesets free plan is nice so you can try first and you don't have to pay while you are building it. The pricing is a little confusing to me with different price plans and different plugins. Perhaps I should try it out and see what price they give me for the features I would use (and might use in the future). Thanks for sharing your site as it's an excellent example.
Thanks also for more references to SquareSpace they have the most mentions. Current tally:
Squarespace - 4
Photofolio - 2
Pixieset - 2
Zenfolio - 1
A few years ago, I was using SmugMug for my photography, but I started feeling limited by their templates and options. I eventually switched to Squarespace, and honestly, I haven’t looked back. The templates are clean, really customizable, and the SEO support is solid, even for someone like me who’s not a tech expert. The e-commerce setup is easy too, so if you decide to sell prints down the road, it’s ready to go.
AMD300 wrote:
I use pixieset and I’ve been very pleased with it for my uses. It’s very easy and quick to get it up and running. My customers have no issues downloading their photos, accessing their galleries and purchasing from my stores. The client management part has really gotten a lot of updates (as has the whole site really, seems they add something nearly monthly).
I have no plans on switching.
www.Andymeadephotography.com if you want to see the layout I am using.
Lara_F wrote:
@AMD300@ - beautiful site - very professional and well done. Pixiesets free plan is nice so you can try first and you don't have to pay while you are building it. The pricing is a little confusing to me with different price plans and different plugins. Perhaps I should try it out and see what price they give me for the features I would use (and might use in the future). Thanks for sharing your site as it's an excellent example.
Thanks also for more references to SquareSpace they have the most mentions. Current tally:
Squarespace - 4
Photofolio - 2
Pixieset - 2
Zenfolio - 1
I had zenfilio for a long time since they started (like 15+ yrs). I finally get ou (5yrs sgo I guess)t. Slow, no support for positing bigger size images. Before Zenfolio I used to have SmugMug. I am just a hobbyist so no selling/printing etc. Now I use plain old Flickr Pro for posting here and dpreview. Interested in seeing all the recommendations you getting as I would like to setup a website someday.
I have a Wordpress website that is hosted on A2. I built it myself and saved the cost of a professional. While this is generally ok, I have gotten somewhat frustrated by it. A2 has been great, so the issue is not with them. The problem is that my theme does not seem to keep things consistent and weird things happen from time to time, such as fonts changing randomly. I also find that, as Wordpress, my theme, and plugins change from time to time, this can cause problems. Occasionally, the site won't work at all, but that is rare. Mostly, the way that I have things set up to look with change and the worst of it is when the galleries don't display correctly. There is also fairly frequent maintenance, although that is usually pretty quick.
So, I am thinking of using the type of service as those discussed above and it is very helpful to read about the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Initially, I looked at SmugMug but it sounds as if there are some draawbacks. Plus, their pricing is pretty high for someone who does not sell much.
AMD300 wrote:
I use pixieset and I’ve been very pleased with it for my uses. It’s very easy and quick to get it up and running. My customers have no issues downloading their photos, accessing their galleries and purchasing from my stores. The client management part has really gotten a lot of updates (as has the whole site really, seems they add something nearly monthly).
I have no plans on switching.
www.Andymeadephotography.com if you want to see the layout I am using.
I've used Pixieset and agree that if you have clients regularly accessing their files from a shoot, it's a great option.
For portfolio only type sites (like what I have now), squarespace is just stupid easy.
