Monday, August 10, 2009

Photo Website CMS: Your Way To Success

Easy website management is probably one of the sacred dreams of any person having a website (of course if you are not a developer enjoying changing your website code every other day). If your main business is offline you just can't afford spending much time of the website maintenance but same time you can't have a website with the outdated info.

In the world of photographers, designers, painters, sculptors this problem is even more pressing. You not only have to make sure that the contact info you have on the website is correct, but you have to upload your new works online, post information about exhibitions and let website visitors know what's your schedule, when you are busy and when you can shoot their wedding. Website management becomes a nightmare. Any time you need a new photo uploaded to the photo gallery or the line of text changes, you have t contact your web developer. And it’s not only about time and money the main problem is that you have no control of your own website.

Imagine that your developer can no longer help you with your website. What to do now? Look for someone else and explain the website technical details you have no idea about or just forget about the website? Start a new website with the new developer and got into the same problem?

Of course, there are several solutions on the market that can help you manage your website, but none of them gives you full control over your website. Some dynamic flash photo galleries let you edit the content on the pages via .txt files and upload your photos to a set number of galleries, others have nice admin areas but they are just the photo galleries that should be integrated with your website in some way. But can this be considered an easy website editing or can this features be enough for a photo website?

The answer is definitely no. And that is why a CMS for photography website is so necessary. CMS stands for Content Management System, that is the system meant for easy and convenient website information management. There can’t be a single definition what should be included into content management system, but the basics are the same. Projecting this to photography website, these are the key features that should be included into photo website cms.

1. Basic management tools for: logo, photo website name, menu names, background.

2. Page builder: add/edit/delete website textual pages.

3. News editor and events manager.

4. Advanced photo galleries

5. Password protected photo galleries.

6. Advanced video galleries.

7. Slideshow creator

8. Ecommerce compatibility.

All these features are twice as necessary if you have a flash photo website. Flash effects make the presentation of your portfolio more unique and interesting but at the same time they make website editing impossible if you are not a flash guru. So what photographers really need is a Flash Photo Website CMS.

In our next posts we'll discuss flash photo gallery solutions and flash content management system available on the market.