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 Gallery designs are nice and simple but look a bit outdated and in general have a similar layout.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.