my site is still in construction, but what I did was bought a template from flashmint.com and then had the same person who did my logo tweak the site to the way I like it. You can veiw it in progress here http://keithgoolsby.com/lovemarriagephoto/lmp1.swf
He's a great guy to work with, so if you don't want to pay outragous prices, but want a template to be customed desinged, drop me a PM and I can give you his contact info. He's gotten this done in just 2 days. So he's really fast.
he does mostly work for record lables, bands and clothing companies. but he's definitely capable of doing photographer's websites. one of the cool things he did with my site is that it has a back end just like bludomain does, which is real nice.
the cool thing about evan is that he is an artist first. he handles all the design and then he has people working for him that do the flash and programming.
I used iweb it came with my macbook pro and it works great everything is drag and drop and i can update it all with a couple clicks. The site was free to make with 5gb of space and I got the domain name from godaddy.com for like $20 a year.
swampcat wrote:
Homebuild, have a bit of a geek inside me
Currently I'll recommend Joomla and Drupal, with apropriate security set in place.
Nice templates and plugins available.
I did mine too. If I was doing again or doing a total redo, I too would recomend Joomla. I've done some work with Joomla and like it. There are some ok photo selling packages done in php. If I was doing a new site I would use Joomla to display my basic site and hook one of the photo selling packages into it.
Joomla or Drupal are Content Management Systems (CMS). They have a backend that allows you to design and maintain your site. Even If you are having someone else do the site, using a CMS will allow you to do the maintance and updates. You don't have to buy dreamweaver or some other web design package since the design is entered on the web through the backend.
Joomla is open source and most of the add-ins are too. They have gone through some issues over open source in the last year. They are enforcing the terms of GNU licenses. It has shaken up many Joomla add-in developers. I don't see Joomla having a solid photo selling package that's intergrated in Joomla.
The one selling package looked ok except for the display of different aspect ratios. If you select 5x7, the image is stretched to fit.
Home-built here as well. Nothing fancy, but gets the job done. Positive feedback I get is my willingness to put pricing on-line... (Don't flame me, please!)
I recently added a few more ways for people to contact me; email form, link to text messaging me, and a free chat option as well.
