Friday, January 8, 2010

BigFolio Review

Company name: Big Folio

Website: www.bigfolio.com

Big Folio grabbed a bunch of world renowned photographers as their customers. The company provides a number of services, including website, SEO and logo design, for creative pursuers. Big Folio’s flash websites go with control panel which gives pretty much features, like unlimited galleries for organizing your photos, video support, customizable contact form, free WordPress blog install, unlimited music tracks and others. Unfortunately, there is no live demo of the admin interface available, so you can’t play around and see the functionality in work. You can take a video tour though.

Designs are done to the T here, indeed. Both standard and premium templates have stylish, modern looking themes. There are 14 templates to choose from, only 2 of them belong to the Standard package. These templates have limited storage space, no videos, only 4 gallery pages and 1 music track. With this, standard template costs $250 setup fee + $15 monthly. I think that’s too much for a great design with quite a regular functionality. They should add some more useful features, a built-in shopping cart, for instance to prove the price. Premium templates cost $450 one time setup fee + $20/mo. You get some more options to control, still not enough to justify the fee.

Big Folio is a self hosted solution, you can’t move your photography website to your own server.
All photography websites are claimed to be SEO-friendly. We’ve checked one of Big Folio powered sites http://beaposer.com/ and it was not that bad. Big Folio states all their templates, even standard, are SEO optimized by default, but it doesn’t happen so in full measure. It seems pretty much in Big Folio service is based on a custom basis which means you need to acquire additional features for your site.

If high quality design is you priority, Big Folio is definitely an option to consider as beautiful website design is their strongest point.
Publish Post

See similar products: ReadyPhotoSite

2 comments:

  1. I believe Big Folio is not one of the most user friendly website/seo/blog/.... solution out there. I had been using Big Folio for a year and I had been pretty much on my own on customizing the site. I do not have much technical background to start with and it took me a long long while to find out what went wrong. There are couple of things that still made me pretty mad:

    (1) they wouldn't tell you when they will transfer my email to Gmail App. I was wondering what's wrong with my email. I didn't receive any emails and finally I found out that my email wasn't set up/transfer correctly. After I submitted a help ticket, problem was fixed within 24 hours. However, I lost those 3 days of emails.

    (2) They advertised how their integrated blog control panel is easy to use. But the Blog control panel does not exist anymore for new users. It is no longer available.

    I agree that Big Folio carries the top web designs in the market. If you love their designs and would like to sign up with them, be prepared. If you have outside resources who can help you with the CSS and stuffs, that will be awesome.

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  2. In web application architecture, high quality design is a priority. In this post, webmasters will have a glimpse of Big Folio and its usefulness in relation to website architecture. We must not also forget that photographs are necessary in web designs. Big Folio is one choice for webmasters for organizing their photos to be used in their websites.

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