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.