MorePhotos Review

Company name: MorePhotos

Website: www.morephotos.com

Recently we’ve stumbled across another photo website oriented software provider, MorePhotos. At first, we were shocked with the amount of info presented at the company’s official website - so many menu sections prevents from getting a quick idea about what MorePhotos is.

Somehow we found the testimonial page and here’s another shock – the designs of websites built with MorePhotos. Interesting, the company offers both photo web templates and custom website solutions, but all the offered designs look terrible and out of date. This is true of both flash and HTML template designs they offer. We even thought they have the same designer with ifp3. If you are about creating an attractive personal identity on the Web, MorePhotos website templates and “custom” designs are a big no-no.

Basically, MorePhotos is an E-Commerce solution providing a web software package for photographers to upload and sell their photos online. Along with the proofing system, they offer some website creation tools enabling to select from several layouts, add your logo, colors, photographs and content to create unlimited number of pages. You can also integrate the system into your existing website and I would say this is the only option for you to make MorePhotos work. I mean this way you can avoid ugly designs they offer but take advantage of the core service. Good point is that you can choose whether to host your site with MorePhotos or with a third-party provider.

MorePhotos is a desktop software package, so you can’t go without downloads, installations and settings. At least, they provide free support service you can apply to via email or phone. 30 days money back guarantee is a nice feature as well, but it’s unclear whether you can claim a refund after 30 days or 60 days.

With all this, MorePhotos is far from being an affordable service. Their pricing model includes $200 set-up fee and monthly plans that depend on the number of image you host. $49/mo is the minimal fee you pay to upload up to 2500 images. Plus, there are some additional fees for extra uploads and customization services.

You can use MorePhotos as a proofing add-on for your existing photography website if the price doesn’t frighten you off. If you don’t have a website, don’t be tempted to follow MorePhotos promises that you will build a unique, elegant website with their site creation tools – your hopes will be disappointed.

Shozam Review

Company name: Shozam

Website: www.shozam.com

Shozam offers a few website software products geared at photographers of all professional levels. They have solution for home, work and business. I liked the basic idea of dividing their software package in several categories. If you want to create a simple digital photo album, you can do it without paying for the functions you won’t use. If you take your photography hobby more seriously, you can upgrade to more advanced account and add video, music and slideshows to your album. Shozam has a solution for those who want to sell their photos online as well.

While the idea of this project is nice, the implementing is less enthusiastic. Again, design is a very frustrating aspect here. They have small thumbnails of design themes, but you have to download the trial for a thorough check. If you want to get an idea about the design solution Shozam delivers right here and right now, you can browse their testimonials and go through their customer’s website links. You will see the plain layouts, weak typography and awkward flash effects, that the company considers being “cool”.

Among the features of Business and Business+ packages we found “Search Engine Optimization” statement. As always, we conducted a quick test of one of the websites built with Shozam www.photographybymorgan.co.uk. Since the core website of the example website is static, its pages are in index. The flash part of the site, photo galleries for instance, is not indexed. Besides, messy URL is what strikes the eyes immediately. It seems guys from Shozam think HTML structure is everything a website needs for SEO.

Let’s look at the prices. The basic software package called Shozam Lite Edition costs $25. By means of it you can create an elementary online photo album without any additional options. If you want to add some music, videos and captions to your album, you are offered to pay $50 for the Express Edition. Customizable photographer website costs $100 here. Shozam Business Edition which comes with E-commerce feature is available for $250; BusinessPlus Edition, which enables to create unlimited galleries for your customers, costs $500. We’ve browsed a lot of various web photo CMS solutions and this one is far from being good. The functionality is nothing but ordinary here and the designs are terrible. So why should I pay $25 for the template I can download for free somewhere else? And I’m sure there are many providers offering websites with integrated E-commerce system and ability to create unlimited galleries and sub-sites charging less than $500.

Among the advantages we’ve found in this product is that it’s not a hosted solution and no subscription fees are charged, there are only one-time payments.

Shozam is desktop software, so it provides some benefits in the upload speed, but it’s definitely not enough. Be sure to download the trial version of this product before buying it.

Ktools Review

Company name: Ktools

Website: www.ktools.net

Ktools.net is a Michigan, USA based web software provider specializing in professional software for selling and hosting photos online. They have three packages to choose from: PhotoStore ($295 per package), PhotoHost ($195 per package) and PhotoSuit ($396 per package).

There is both public view and admin interface of all software packages available for the preview. We took a look at the management area demo and must admit, Ktools.net done justice to them developing these products. PhotoStore includes all tools and options necessary for managing a professional, advanced photo selling website. By means of this package you can create a full-fledged stock photo website and also sell both your personal photography and prints. Among other great features are: ability to sell video files, lightbox plugin, changeable watermark, built in statistics, multi-language and multi-currency support. In case you want to create a pro photo hosting website, PhotoHost solution might be what you are looking for. You can integrate both website schemes by choosing the PhotoSuit package.

Still and though we like the features offered, I have to admit that designs they offer with the software are outated and boring. The other thing I didn’t like about the Ktools.net services is that they are not accessible for non-professional users. The designs of all three kits are customizable, but you need to know HTML to do that. The website management environment is rich, but don’t look intuitive and user-friendly. They claim to offer an expert Support, but it’s free only first 60 days, than you will have to pay for the service. Besides, they don’t offer any help on customizing your website, such requests will be simply ignored.

Ktools.net is undoubtedly a nice service, but if you have no idea of how to manage or customize a website, it will be either a pain for you to deal with these products yourself or a pain for your purse to pay for the support.. Still, Ktools.net software may be worth a try, since it can be a good base for a powerful commercial photo website.

Jalbum Review

Company name: Jalbum

Website: jalbum.net

Jalbum provides photo album websites that you can customize by means of skins and widgets. You can publish your album to yourname.jalbum.net or your own website. Content management system is out of the question here, Jalbum is a nice service for beginner and amateur photographers who want to combine some personal space with the ability to share their works with the big community.

Jalbum provides three types of accounts: Free, Premium and Power. 30MB storage, ads appearing on your page and number of home page themes limited to 4 is what you can get for free. If you are about to customize your page design you can switch to the Premium account which regularly costs $23 per year. All the same options supported with 10Gb storage are available in Power account ($116/year regular price).

In order to create a site with Jalbum you need to download the Jalbum application to your computer. Skins can be applied to your website after you download them too. You can also add functionality to your Jalbum by integrating some widgets.

Basically, Jalbum is a photography social network with customizable personal space. Quite a nice service as long as it suits your requirements. Best of all about it that it’s free.

Ifp3 Review

Company name: ifp3

Website: www.ifp3.com

ifp3 provides a flash content management application that enables to “create an elegant, interactive flash website in minutes”. After a more thorough examination we would exclude the words “elegant ” and “interactive” from the above statement. There are 5 awful template designs each coming with 6 color themes to choose from and none of them can boast of being elegant or at least beautiful. We issue an appeal to ipf3: “Guys do fire your designer! This your only chance, seriously.”

Speaking about the functionality offered by ifp3, it’s not bad at all. All the core options a photographer’s or artist’s website should have are included: unlimited images, pages and galleries, shopping cart, appearance editor, color picker, search function, etc. Mobile phone optimization and integrated Lightbox are cool features as well. You can see a live preview of how your website will look on iPhone and BlackBerry. They offer 10 day free trial so you could check all the system and make a decision whether it fits your needs.

Testing one of the ifp3’s example websites www.jkennedyphotography.com for SEO-friendliness, we couldn’t say the result was bad. All text pages and image titles are indexed. Although URL structure is ugly and no hint at image keywords was observed. Our recap of the ifp3 SEO optimization is: fair, but still far from SEO-friendliness.

ifp3 is a hosted solution, this mean hosting is included in your plan and you have no option to host your site on a third-party server. They also charge additional $45 setup fee if you use your own domain name instead of ifp3 sub-domain. Another sad moment is that ifp3 doesn’t host email accounts. Their pricing policy is based on long-term subscription loyalty. Hence, if you choose to pay for the service on a monthly basis, it will cost you $30/mo. You can save $10 if choose an annual plan, but in this case you have to pay $240 in advance. $540 prepay for the 3 years subscription equals $15 per month.

In general, ifp3 offers a nice set of functions and that would count if it were not the very low quality designs that remind me of early 90’s. Double check everything before subscribing for this service and don't forget to check solutions by other companies ( you will find links to reviews on the right).

PortfolioSitez Review

Company name: PortfolioSitez

Website: www.portfoliositez.com

PortfolioSitez is a small company founded by two charming ladies Jamie and Jen. If you are about to create an online photography portfolio, take a look at what they offer. There are 5 templates available at PortfolioSitez gallery. The designs are done in a classical style. I think the opportunities the Flash gives to the designers are not used here in full measure. You won’t see any fancy effects , but if you search for a simple, yet nice looking website design, you can find one at PortfolioSitez.

You can choose both stand-alone version of the template (which can reside on your own Linux server) and the one supported with a content management suit and hosting on PortfolioSitez servers. All templates are available for the preview, there are even a few modified versions showcased, so you could see what you can do with the site. There is no public admin interface preview or trial period, but you can request the sample preview, which is not bad either.

3 templates of 5 have HMTL mirror site option. This enable quick site loading, but unfortunately, doesn’t live up our expectations concerning SEO-friendliness. We tested one of the Portfolio Sitez’ customer website www.mortierphotographie.com. The Flash version of website is disappointingly un-SEO-friendly, and when we click on HTML version of the website, Flash is loading again! Well, bugs happen :) At least we are glad to see that PortfolioSitez don’t lie about super SEO friendly websites they offer.

There are three basic plans for those who decided to go with PortoflioSitez: Entry Plan is the most elementary one, it goes without some useful feature like integrated shopping cart and password protected galleries, as well as html mirror site, but you’ll have to pay $20 setup fee and $5 re-occurring fee monthly. Next step in their price plan is Standard, it includes html mirror option for some templates and calendar section. If you like this, kindly add $6 to the monthly fee, the setup fee is the same. Premium templates include the complete set of features and cost $16/mo + $20 set up fee. If you want to order a single template and host it on your own server, you can buy it for $200, but notice they have some specific requirements to the third-party severs.

To conclude the above said, PortfolioSitez is a pretty nice and affordable service. You can find customers’ positive feedback on their Testimonials page. What I like about this company, is that it doesn’t charge more than it offers. If you want to have a simple, nice looking photography websites with some basic yet useful functionality, if unique design and extraordinary online identity are not among you current business goals, PortfolioSitez is a good solution for you.

There are also lots of other photography website software reviews available on our blog, use the links on the right to browse. Good luck with your new photography website!

Clickbooq Review

Company name: Clickbooq

Website: www.clickbooq.com

Clickbooq offers a web-based site management and design application for flash photography websites. In general, the functionality of the Clickbooq CMS is rich, but we’ve got impression that it’s somewhat too rich and may look confusing for a non-professional user.

Clickbooq website editing solution doesn’t include design templates. You can create a website from scratch, using a content management system called Toolbox. The backbone of the website here is a number of pre-built layouts and some extra design services, such as custom BackDrop backgrounds. The company provides users with drag-and-drop editing environment, numerous tools for design and content management. The administration interface looks pretty intuitive and user-friendly, however and let me repeat myself, it makes me think the user can get lost in this variety of options.

There is a small drawback in Clickbooq photo website package, there is limitation in the number of content pages one can have as well as the number of portfolios. Thus, all Clickbooq plans (not really affordable, by the way) come with only 5 portfolios and 5 content pages. You can have bonus 5 portfolios choosing a one-time plan which is $1699 (!!!!!!!!!!) setup fee and $99/year for the hosting. This bonus pales before the price, don’t you think? Each portfolio can hold up to 36 full-size images and if you need some more galleries to store you photos, be so kind to pay extra money - $50 for the each additional portfolio.

We should admit that Clickbooq brings pretty cool opportunities to their customers in terms of website visual appearance. We had a look at the gallery of websites built with Clickbooq and most of them are attractive and stylish. Lightbox is another neat feature included, it allows the visitors of your site to fave your photographs and send them to other prospects. This can come in handy for the website promotion.

Clickbooq is another flash photo CMS provider failed the SEO-friendliness test. They claim clickbooq websites are based on deep linking and have HTML mirror sites to make all the content indexable. Well, a simple site: command in Google search applied to the sites http://www.simonandrewscooks.com and http://www.blakemarvin.com/ showed us ugly URLs and one indexed page that is duplicated multiple times. The snippet shown on the results page was nice, though. Conclusion: clickbooq websites are not completely SEO-friendly, but have good preconditions to be so.

Clickbooq delivers a fine service, but the price they want for it is totally unjustified. Another hosted solution and another astronomic price:
$99 setup fee + $79/mo
Or $499/yr + $99/yr hosting
Or $1699 one time fee + $99 hosting one time fee.

If your website design matters to you a great deal and you want to control the whole process, Clickbooq can be a reasonable solution for you, but I would order a fully custom unique website at this price. Be sure to take advantage of free 5 days trial to check the system. Although, some limits in functionality and features and of course, the price, seriously decrease the attractiveness of this software.

There are also lots of other photography website software reviews available on our blog, use the links on the right to browse. Good luck with your new photography website!

25 Spectacular Flash Photography Websites

Not only does successful photography website require a good bunch of creativity, it also needs pretty much time and effort to be put in its development. There are thousands of website building solutions floating the Web today and sometimes you may have hard times finding the right one. Flash is probably the most powerful platform for creating a site, especially when it comes to photography portfolio. Besides reviewing web photo CMS products, we would like to provide you with some inspiration too. Here is a collection of topnotch flash photography websites to give you the idea about current design trends and best practices. All designs presented below are exclusive and developed by professional design studios. If you have any suggestions on photo sites built with some CMS’, share them in comments!

Anders Bergh


Emmanuel Rouzic


Dattuphoto


Edlo Kawa


Fredrik Clement


Georgiew


Joel Grimes


Lyndon Wade


John Wrigh



Lee Towndrow


Jeremy Cowart


Werkstette


Matthew Mahon

Working Element

Joby Sessions


Joshua Stearns


Ciril Jazbec


David Vasiljevic


Brook Pifer


SasoKos

EgoFoto


rw2 Studios


Andreas Smetana

MPO Photography Webmasters Review

Company name: MPO Photography Webmasters

Website: www.photographywebmasters.com

Examination of the MPO Photography Webmasters’ product brought a doubtful feel to me. It is unclear whether this is a photography CMS-based website provider with extremely expensive hosting plans, or a hosting provider delivering editable photo websites as an extra offer. Let me explain what I mean.

MPO Photography Webmasters offers free photography website templates. Their websites are not completely Flash based, each template contains Flash home page, the rest of the pages are static. Well, frankly speaking, their websites are not completely free. Yes, you don’t have to pay for the template if you choose an “as is” design option. This means, you can manage the content, but not the design elements. You can customize the navigation buttons at no charge though. If you want to apply some deeper changes to your website, you can order this option for $99. To switch among the templates you should pay the “redesign fee” which is $99 as well. Not very user-friendly, right?

Free set-up, along with free design, can work for you in case you don’t have high requirements to your website. Fortunately, the variety of design themes created by the MPO is big enough – there are 12 design categories available. All designs seem outdated and cluttered to us, still tastes differ (let’s not forget about the customization option) and maybe you might find the design that would appeal to you a great deal here.

If you are encouraged with opportunity to get a simple yet nice photo website with flash home page for free, we’re afraid there is something in this offer that will disappoint you, that’s hosting fee. It’s not enough that there is no option to host your website on your own server, available plans are also priced into the stratosphere. Just imagine, the Standard hosting plan (with a disk space for up to 2000 images) costs $29.95 per month. This is the minimal plan, they also have a Colossus Plan which presupposes up to 20K images disk space and costs $99.95/Mo. Maybe this would sound reasonable for stock photo website owners, but we are not sure whether this can work for an individual portfolio.

MPO Photography Webmasters is another photo website software provider that claims their sites are user friendly and will be indexed by all search engines in 3 weeks. Once again, the results of our brief SEO-friendliness test are frustrating. Wrong URL structure, important info embedded in Flash instead of HTML code, incorrect website structures – all this is too far away from being SEO-friendly.

Another depressing moment is the absence of trial period. What you can do is to browse designs, choose the one you like and order the service. This is a strange situation today as the “try before buy” principle is essential in terms of modern tough competition.

Maybe “unmatched support” so much highlighted on the MPO Photography Webmasters official website will shed light on all these unclear and unjustified questions. We didn’t find any testimonials or discussions related to the quality of the customer support, and that would be much to the point.

Except the diverse templates gallery and a number of neat features (if it counts at all – there is no preview of the admin interface) we don’t see any benefits the MPO Photography Webmasters photo site solution can bring to the average users. You can see the big words and descriptions, but we can’t really feel the product before ordering it. In conclusion, we would like to admit that if you want to avoid risks and everlasting conversations with tech support, you’d better look for some more reliable photo website software provider.

You will find links to reviews of other photography websites available on the market on the right. Good luck with your new website!

PhotoBiz Review

Company name: PhotoBiz

Website: www.photobiz.com

PhotoBiz provides the whole range of web services for photographers, including online proofing, flash websites, slideshow galleries and “mini sites”. They have five flash website design collections containing over 70 templates. The company’s pricing model consists of two parts: one time set-up fee which is $125 (regular $250) and 6 basic monthly plans, starting from $15/mo.

The template design gallery by PhotoBiz leaves a positive impression – there are lots of various themes available and many of them are stylish and original. You can preview each template, however there is no trial period available, so you can’t test the administration system. You can switch designs both within separate collection and between different collections. No additional costs required to do this, and the system will automatically update everything you’ve already done to the website - definitely a plus. $125 one time set-up fee gives users a complete access to all five design collections. But we find it strange that it’s positioned like an advantage. Every of the PhotoBiz’ template design categories has a particular number of features, some collections are simple while others provide an advanced website functionality. On the one hand, this is good as you can choose the package right for your needs, but in fact you pay the same money both for simple and extended functionality. So what’s the point? I think it would be more reasonable to keep the price stuck to the set of the features the photo website software provides.

As other companies we have already reviewed, PhotoBiz say they do care about SEO. The system creates the mirror html sites of the flash website and thus your website should get to the index of search engines. Let’s make a test, here’s one of the websites http://kylehitchcock.com/ that left a positive feedback towards PhotoBiz software on the Testimonials page (unfortunately, no links to the testimonial submitters’ websites are given). We can see the title, meta description and keywords in the index page of the website and you will see this info in Google as well (I’d suggest PhotoBiz to make some small manual on writing friendly and useful meta data though). Now let’s find what pages from the website have been indexed by google using the “site” command. Great news- there are 25 pages found! Hooray PhotoBiz! The only thing you guys should look at is the structure of the URLs, links like http://kylehitchcock.com/?pageID=21141 are friendly neither for users nor for search engines.

Our testing proved that PhotoBiz doesn’t lie telling customers sophisticated XML site mapping and deep linking are implemented in their flash websites. The tested website is still far from being SEO-friendly in full measure, but the overall situation with search engine optimization of PhotoBiz flash websites is on a decent level. Besides, the company offers SEO expert consulting to their customers which is a benefit as well. By the way, we noticed that many testimonials are dedicated to the PhotoBiz Support team. It seems, the company pays much attention to helping their customers.

PhotoBiz would be even closer to being an excellent photo website management service if it wasn’t a hosted solution. Yes, again users have no choice when it comes to site residing. Well, at least their monthly plan system supports a reasonable disk space split, so that it’s easier for a user to find the one according to the amount of imagery they are going to host.

In general, PhotoBiz offers a high quality web photo CMS solution with many nifty features included. However, the system of set-up fee + monthly fee makes it rather expensive but I think it’s worth it (if you can afford it). Still, the ability to host website on user’s own server would definitely lower costs and this is something you should take into consideration.

You will find links to reviews of other photography websites available on the market on the right. Good luck with your new website!

Picaholic Review

Company name: Picaholic

Website: www.picaholic.com

Picaholic offers flash website software for creative professionals. The guys at Picaholic claim they had “removed the time, complexity and time-to-market normally associated with building high-end flash site”. Let’s look closer at what you can get choosing this service.

The Picaholic website management package comes with pre-built flash templates. Currently there are 4 templates available at the company’s display gallery. By the way, it’s rather weird that a user needs to hunt around the Picaholic website in order to find the list of available templates. I found it in the FAQ section, for instance. The templates look nice, each of them has its own menu system, image gallery and page layouts. Video background is a cool feature, such gurus of flash web design as HelloMonday often use this hook in their practice. The ability to switch between templates in one click is a nice touch. However, the lack of diversity and originality in Picaholic template designs can be felt immediately. The company promised new templates to be deployed on a monthly basis in 2009, it’s December and still there are just four themes offered. Instead, the company highlights the ability to order an advanced website customization and a team of professionals can design the website for you for some extra fee.

Picaholic delivers a few decent opportunities worth your attention. These are unlimited pages, zip image upload, high impact images and videos, password protected galleries, free 7 day trial, and what’s more pleasant, 30 money back guarantee. The fact you can’t reside your site on your own servers darkens the aforesaid advantages a bit.

Among the great features provided by Picaholic are mobile compatibility and cross-browser support. At present visitors can view images and text on their mobile devices, including iPhone and Blackberry. Video streams are promised to be released soon.

One of the main highlights you can see in the feature list of Picaholic is SEO-friendly site structure. Let’s make an experiment and test one of the websites created with Picaholic for SEO-friendliness. We’ve searched for the pages indexed on this website www.lisazimmitti.com. We have found that there are links to the website pages in index but they all have the same meta description which is not SEO friendly. Plus, no text content was indexed on those pages except that the page has a flash file on it. This means the pages, even though they are in Google index, are useless. Another step is to type “lisa zimmitti contact” in Google to see if the contact page would show up. What we got was the same index page with "design by picaholic" as a snippet. Thus, the website failed the test – this is definitely not as SEO friendly as Picaholic states.

Now let’s see what all this enjoyable flash websites management claimed by Picaholic team will cost you. There are 3 payment options presupposing the long-term subscription loyalty: from $25 per month; from $60 per quarter; from $200 annually. Not too expensive, but my opinion is that the current functionality of Picaholic websites is a bit overpriced. For justice’ sake, we should admit that the company is developing and many new options are announced to be implemented in the flash websites in future. So let’s wait until the number of advantages will correspond to the price.

On Picaholic.com home page you can see a showcase of websites built using this software. Judging by this gallery and a number of positive testimonials available on the main page as well, lots of people are happy with the Picaholic product. All presented designs are beautiful and original. The only drawback we’ve noticed is that a bunch of websites loads rather slowly.

In general, solutions offered by Picaholic are satisfying and you can build a nice looking portfolio website using this software. However, we recommend you to take advantage of the trial period and check all the functionality and options carefully in order to make sure the product will return the expenses.

Hope this post was useful. You will find links to other systems reviews on the right.

FolioLink Review

Company name: FolioLink

Website: www.foliolink.com

FolioLink offers portfolio websites created both in flash and HTML. They have 3 account types (turnkey, premium and pro) that differ in features available and pricing, which starts from $239.00/yr plus $149.00 one time set up payment. The system is template-based (like say the WordPress for example), so you can update and switch between 20 website layouts at any time. Gallery designs are nice and simple but look a bit outdated and in general have a similar layout.

What I don’t like about FolioLink website is that there is no a well-defined list of functionality on the website so it’s hard to guess what list of features to expect. It would be also great to have some kind of demo one can view without signing up for a free trial (yes, they have a free 7 day trial available). What you can definitely do within functionality offered is upload unlimited number of images and sell them online(without commission to FolioLink and with lots of great selling features available), create unlimited number of text pages, change the default logo on design to your one, track website stats using Google Analytics.

As stated on FolioLink website, both portfolio and image archive sites are optimized for search engine visibility and flash websites include large shadow HTML websites which is definitely great. But if you pay more attention to the websites themselves you will definitely notice that a link to the home page like this one http://website.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=24376&Akey=V9LPVA4M doesn’t look SEO friendly at all not speaking about user-friendliness. Let’s make another test. Here’s one of the websites they list as sample on design page: http://thompsonweddings.com Let’s go to google and type in “thompson weddings” and see what shows up ( if the website is indexable we should see some nice snippet, or meta description):

"Peter Wynn Thompson Portfolio - BOOK I, BOOK II, BOOK III ...
FolioLink Websites for artists and photographers (c) 2003-2008 ISProductions.
thompsonweddings.com"

As we can see, all that got indexed on the index page is the copyright by foliolink and no nice info about photographer or photo services. Strange, right?

The other thing that I don’t like about FolioLink and other similar solutions is that you have to host with them. Usually you could pay $7 for a cool hosting and be quite happy about it as well as feel safer having 100% control over your websites files. As for the domain name, you can register it with FolioLink or elsewhere.

The photography solutions offered by FolioLink would work for you quite perfectly if you have a bunch of photos to sell online (like some stock photo website) but is too much if you’d like to create a nice online portfolio and are not ready to spend around $400 on the features that you don’t actually need. I haven’t found any reviews of FolioLink at websites like www.talkreviews.com but there were lots of discussions on photography forums. Some of the their clients are happy with the service, some are not, so I guess you should sign up for FolioLink trial to get your own opinion. There are also lots of other photography website software reviews available on our blog, use the links on the right to browse.

PhotoShelter Review

Company name: PhotoShelter

Website: www.photoshelter.com

PhotoShelter is a nice photography website software allowing you to build a website in about 5 mins. They have 9 basic designs/layouts to choose from, also there are options to order a fully custom website design or integrate the galleries with your existing website. All PhotoShelter websites are fully e-commerce enabled (lots of pricing profiles, product types etc) and SEO friendly. They can also offer you a choice of three print labs that can automatically fulfill any print and product orders - you set the prices, they print and ship.

There's no limit to the number of galleries you can display on a website - and you control layout style, image size, navigation items, on-page text, watermarks, and more. PhotoShelter has a nice "post to facebook" tool lets you easily export a gallery to Facebook, or post a link on Facebook walls and fan pages. You can also add a "share this" tool to your website, enabling visitors to post links to your images across their favorite social networks.

PhotoShelter websites are not built with Flash which is perfect for a corporate website but seems to be a bit boring for a website of an artist. At some point PhotoShelter websites are more of a solid selling tool for photographer (to sell the artwork online) rather than a place introducing their work to public.

PhotoShelter offers 4 plans to choose from that differ in functionality and features included. Starter plan set-up is free and the pro plan (most advanced one) is $549/year. You host and register the domain name with PhotoShelter by default.

I think that PhotoShelter is a great website tool with great customer support but the designs are a bit standard. With PhotoShelter websites you will have great photo galleries functionality but you won’t stand out from the crowd. The ecommerce features are really cool but if you are not planning to sell your works online yet (and of you don’t have thousands of photos to sell) you can search for a cheaper solution. You can consider flash photography websites by other companies, order an XML based template or a nicely designed flash website with the admin area like ReadyPhotoSite or Bludomain.

SiteWelder Review

Company name: SiteWelder

Website: http://www.sitewelder.com/

SiteWelder is a photo website software allowing you to create photo websites and online portfolios on SiteWelder servers. The process is pretty simple, once you register in a system just login to your interface to upload your images and move them into the galleries. You can also create text pages in the WYSIWYG editor (but only up to 10 pages) and add pdf files and video to your website. The system is template based and as they say one can easily change the look-and-feel of the website to one of their 500+ layout/theme combinations. It’s also possible to integrate your existing website design into SiteWelder for additional fee and order custom modifications to the standard themes.

A standard SiteWelder account has unlimited galleries with up 750 images on the server, if you need more you have to pay $5 a month for an additional 250 images. There’s also a shopping cart linked to Paypal so you can sell your photos online.

Among the list of features provided they also list “easy search engine indexing and optimization” but it doesn’t seem to make sense as most of the static (html, php, asp whatever) pages are indexeable by default if only the content is not inside some kind of a script. There’s also site statistics available as the part of the service but you can usually get all possible data from google analytics. Also, speaking about SEO optimization, the structure of the URLs is important as well but I can’t say that a link like /gallery.html?gallery=still life %2f food is friendly.

Nice addition to your photo website is a random home page gallery option that displays a different image on every new visit to the home page. Well, it could be even more interesting to have a slideshow option on the home page, right?

Though the SiteWelder software has lots of nice features, there are other factors we should take a look at.

The price. There is a one time $250 start up fee and $450 yearly hosting. That’s a bunch of money to spend while the functionality is nice but not exclusive.

Hosting. You can’t choose your hosting company and have full control over all the settings. While the advanced hosting package costs $10 on average a month (150 GBSpace), $450 a year is a way too much.

You have a website but at the same time it feels like it’s not fully yours. You depend on the system.

Designs. SiteWelder is offering lots of designs but they are not attractive. I agree that it’s complicated to integrate a complex detailed design into the system but at least the style should be up-do-date. If I were to create my own static portfolio I would choose Wordpress (Creating A WordPress Photography Portfolio: Plugins, Themes, Tutorials). There are lots of free designs available, tens of plugins and you can built in Google analytics.

Good thing is that we haven’t seen bad customer reviews, so if you can spend $800 a year and don’t need something special you can rely on SiteWelder. Still why don’t you check all the solutions available on the market?

Bludomain vs...?

Bludomain Review

Company name: Bludomain

Website: www.bludomain.com

Bluedomain is the company selling ready-made websites for photographers, their prices for website vary from $50 to $400 depending on website look and feel and functionality. Basic websites include features like adding your logo and background, but have a set number of pages and photo galleries. $100 websites have more advanced functionality, which includes shopping cart, photo, video and music uploaders and watermark. $400 websites are most advanced and include features like unlimited galleries, calendar, proofing section, shopping cart, optional video feature, songs per gallery but still a limited number of pages. Colors on site can’t be changed and there’s not much design freedom.

You can host your website on your own (with any hosting company) or host with Bludomain and the hosting fee depends on the package that you choose. Website designs are pretty nice but there is one big problem about this company, the lack of customer support. If you search online for the Bludomain reviews you’ll be surprised by the number of people dissatisfied with product delivery time and support. Still and what makes us wonder, tens of people order from Bludomain.com every month (based on customer list they publish on their website).

Bludomain is not showing up in the search engines on the first 3 pages for any query related to photography website creation and design, as well as photography website software that makes us think that they rely mostly on offline advertizing campaigns and maybe that’s the reason of the poor online support.

The other thing that I personally don’t like about Bludomain is being added to the list of customers on their website. I mean that all the websites look more or less similar and seeing another 10 people ordering that same template that same month would definitely be a red stop sign for me. I don’t want my clients to know that I’m using a template for my website and I don’t want them to find other 10 similar websites from that list.

I have reviewed over 100 websites based on Bludomain designs. Some of them say Bad Gateway, some still have the default Bludomain in website title, some designs look beautiful, some look ugly.
Overall Bludomain is not a bad system to have your photography website built, but according to google more and more people are looking for “bludomain vs”, ” bludomain alternatives”, “bludomain review”, “alternative to bludomain”, “ bludomain competitors”. It’s up to you only, whether to order from Bluedomain or look for alternatives (check the list of the reviews available on the right).

Hope this small review was helpful. Good luck!

Creating A WordPress Photography Portfolio: Plugins, Themes, Tutorials

Among existing photographer website platforms WordPress definitely is not the one to be overlooked. The latest releases of this software showed that WordPress extended its potential far beyond the blogging base getting more and more popularity as a comprehensive content management system.

Being armed with a set of image gallery related plugins a photographer can turn WordPress blog into a full-functional photo blog or even personal portfolio website. While photography website software like Ready Photo Site offer some easy-to-handle online photo site solutions for the creatives with little to none designer and programmer knowledge, WordPress platform requires some more advanced skills. Although WP engine becomes more user-friendly and simple-to-use with every new update, still you have to get your hands a bit dirty in some coding, plugin installation and theme configurations choosing it. If you are not ready to this, you’d better search for some CMS based flash photo website solution. However, if you are ready to spend some time and effort digging into the WordPress specs, you can create a professional photo website without any money expenses and in a matter of a few hours.

This article is aimed to help those who consider WordPress as a platform for website photo gallery or personal portfolio. Here you will find the list of useful photo gallery plugins, WP portfolio themes and tutorials. All materials and resources featured here are free to use and download. Besides, you can drive the inspiration from the collection of beautiful WordPress photo websites showcased in the end of the post.

Free WordPress Photoblog & Portfolio Themes

Using a pre-built WordPress theme is a reasonable solution for a start-up photography website. You can try the general system and see if you are comfortable with WordPress as a platform for your online photo gallery, and then you can switch to an exclusive commercial theme. Besides, very often free design layouts look very stylish and have a kind of premium look, so perhaps you will find the best photo site to your taste in this theme category.

ShutterThemes Free Photo Gallery Theme | Demo | Download

PhotographerDream WordPress Theme | Demo | Download

Watercolor | Demo | Download

Hair Tyson | Demo | Download

Page-photo | Demo | Download

AutoFocus | Demo | Download

The Unstandard WordPress Theme | Demo | Download

Fotolog theme | Demo | Download

Reflection | Demo | Download

Viewport | Demo | Download

Grace | Demo | Download

Fotofolio | Demo | Download

Grain | Demo | Download

WP Pix | Demo | Download

Linguist | Demo | Download

WordPress Image Gallery Plugins

1. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a comprehensive Image Gallery plugin for WordPress which includes such neat features as: flash slideshow, quick-to-sort http://webphotocms.fileave.com and albums, watermark function, tag support for http://webphotocms.fileave.com and many other cool options. This is one of the best solutions for organizing a full-fledged photography gallery based on WP.

2. Yet Another Photoblog

This is a full incorporated plugin that will help you convert WordPress into a handy photoblog system. It may come in handy if your theme is not of a portfolio type and you don't know how to tailor it to your needs. Yet Another Photoblog plugin allows practically every theme become a photoblog in virtually no time. Among usable options it provides are easy image upload, controllable thumbnail generation, EXIF data processing and output, out of the box sidebar widget and much more.

3. AWSOM Pixgallery

This is a native WordPress plugin, it doesn't require any file changes or external integration tools to be configured. All options can be managed within the regular WP Admin panel. It includes such features as Automatic Watermarking, captioning using the Visual Editor or HTML, sorting, auto-thumbnailing, Comicpress theme support, per image/gallery commenting and more.

4. Lightbox Gallery

The Lightbox Gallery plugin changes the view of galleries to the Lightbox, plus it displays the related metadata with the http://webphotocms.fileave.com. The associated caption for each image is viewed through a tool tip when you hover a mouse on a thumbnail.

5. Carousel Gallery (jQuery)

This plugin tweaks the WordPress gallery tag replacing it with a jQuery powered carousel.

6. PhotoSmash Galleries

PhotoSmash Galleries enables to create multiple photo galleries in posts or pages that your visitors can upload http://webphotocms.fileave.com to.

7. FlippingBook WordPress Gallery Plugin

This is a fully integrated image gallery plugin for WordPress with page flipping effect. It allows creating flash flipping books directly from the administrator panel via a specifically designed interface. The free version of this plugin is limited by GPL license.

8. IImage Panorama

This is a neat plugin which helps you create a 360 degree panorama picture to add to your blog.

9. Picasna

Picasna is a fullscreen flash photo gallery plugin that uses Google's Picasa 3 for editing and managing your photos. You can upload http://webphotocms.fileave.com directly to Picasa Web Albums and they will appear on your website in seconds.

10. Flickr Gallery

This plugin allows you to quickly upload Flickr photos on your site.

11. Featured Content Gallery

Featured Content Gallery is a customizable WordPress plugin that builds an automated rotating image gallery of your posts or pages for use anywhere within your theme.

Tutorials

1. WordPress Portfolio Theme Layout

In this tutorial you will learn how to put together a quick, simple but effective layout for WordPress based website photo gallery. This is a portfolio design, but the techniques and strategies used in this design could be applied elsewhere across the Web as well.

2. WordPress Gallery Tutorial (as seen on Ma.tt)

This tutorial explains how to create a WordPress image gallery similar to the one on Matt Mullenweg's website using nothing but core WordPress functionality.

3. How To: Plugin Free Photo Galleries in WordPress

In this tutorial you will find information on how to create a plugin-free image gallery in WordPress.

4. WordPress Image Galleries

By means of this tutorial you will learn how to make a Lightbox/Slideshowesque display of your gallery http://webphotocms.fileave.com without any custom coding but just with a couple of plugins and tweaks.

5. WordPress NextGen Gallery Tutorial

NextGEN is a great plugin to use to create WordPress Galleries. This is the introductory tutorial from the series that will walk you through each step of the NextGEN plugin integration.

Beautiful WordPress Photography Websites

Here is a collection of exquisite WordPress powered photography websites for your inspiration.

Rannie Turingan

Charlie Stout

Enrapture

Justine Ungaro

Ryerson Photography

Stennie Photography

Portfolio/Photography

Utzel-Butzel Photoblog

Jorg Jackel

Ericksmithrocks

Eggraphy

As you see, you can easily create a decent portfolio with WordPress. If you expect your website to be more dynamic and interactive, consider flash platform like Ready Photo Site or Foliolink as a basis for it. Ready Photo Site flash photography website is a reasonable solution - you can build an attractive flash site using an intuitive graphic interface and content management system.