Website Planning: Hosting

Check out my photos on Flickr and DeviantArt

I started this series before and my first post that this is replacing was utter crap. So, as my 2nd attempt I hope it shall be better.

As you all know, I am a photographer and the most important tool in any photographers arsenal is their portfolio. Now of days you can still keep your physical portfolio for job interviews, but how do you get to the actual Interview? Let's skip past all of the cold calls and luck, Its by having a good digital portfolio.

There are several options these days for making and keeping a portfolio online. A few are free and others take time, skill, and a web savy programming guy to keep. On this post, I am just going to mention a few of your options and the series of posts that follow, I will describe the process I am going through for making my website.

The easiest options available are through free services such as DeviantArt and Flickr. Both sites have a strong presence and have an extensive amount of forums where you can ask any kind of question imaginable and get a decent answer. Both of these sites offer extended services for an extra price such as detailed statistics extended space for storing more images and videos. DeviantArt also offers the ability to order your prints with the commision going to you, and the ability to make a custom portfolio with your own web address.

A couple other free services that are fairly easy to setup is by signing up with free blogging services such as wordpress.com and Blogger.com. They only take minutes to setup, choose your color scheme/template and to get rollin. With either of these options, you can mesh it with Flickr and make a set/slideshow on Flickr and then post it on your blog. Its a bit harder to go this route because there is a bit more you have to worry about custimization wise, but if you are more of a computer oriented person, It should come more naturally to you.

And the last option is to do what I am doing which is building my own site from scratch. This is the hardest  of the options because you have to know some programming. At the moment, I know I am going to be building my main site using Flash, but I have to check and see what my options are for having a mobile site.

If you are looking at building up your portfolio check out some of these links:

Sign up for DeviantArt

Sign up for Flickr

making a portfolio site using wordpress

making a portfolio using Blogger

Great resource if you want to build your own site

What are some of your experiences with starting your web site, and have you found any success

Web Site Planning Part 1

One of the most important issues that artists have to deal with is how to show their work and how to get paying jobs. There are convenient sites on the internet that solve the issue of how to show their work such as Deviant Art and Flickr, but these sites can only take you so far. These sites are great tools for entering contests and getting noticed if you don't want to pursue a professional career, and they can help you get feedback from other knowledgeable artists. By the way, I have profiles on DeviantArt and Flickr where I actively post my work. Mostly my unedited shots go up on Flickr and my edited shots go on DeviantArt.

I'm at the point where I need something a bit more professional so I can get side jobs in the future, and having my own website is the way to go. The problems I face are very few but somewhat overwhelming. I, like most other photographers, am really cheap. Not so much cheap as I am frugal, which is a concept my friends don't ever get about me. They look at my over sized nose and go straight to cheap. So, I am looking to build and design my own website but there are a ridiculous amount of options these days for making a website. Before, you used to have to go down to the bookstore and pick up a book on HTML and Javascript and hope you don't get bored after 10 minutes. These days, there are about 15 different ways to make a site. The most plausible options I have seem to be either Flash or Wordpress.

Wordpress is a content management system that is basically a template that is very simple to add new content with very little to no change to the site other than the new content. It has several add-ons used for automating and simplifying the entire process so there is less to learn and less to do which is very easy for a person with little knowledge of how to run a website. There are several different addons to facilitate showing off my images, but it seems to be a bit too much for what I am looking for.

My other option is to design my site using Adobe Flash. Flash is a design system with an incorporated programming language called Actionscript. The hardest part about going this route is that I have to do every part of the process myself as opposed to wordpress where all the functions are done and ready to go and the design needs to be changed.

On Part 2, I will be going over the actual process of planning and what factors to think about when devising a concept for your site.