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 All designs seem outdated and cluttered to us, still tastes differ (let’s not forget about the customization option) and maybe you might find the design that would appeal to you a great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.