Need help with my photography website!

[MikeHoyer]

I'm trying to set up a fairly decent website to showcase my photos and stuff. The problem is, my web design skills aren't up to much, and I'm struggling to come up with anything that looks good... the photo galleries themselves aren't a problem, but it's everything else...

Any advice on a photography site, or links to good resources and things? The hardest thing I'm finding is to decent graphical enhancements and things, I can do text, insert pictures, hyperlinks and stuff, but much beyond that and I'm stumped...

[Logrence]

I'm no photographer (but I regularly chew orbit sugar free...kidding) - but what I would do is find yourself some cheap webspace; I got mine for £30 for 2 years...and simply use frontpage to come up with a simple, easy, nice-looking website.

I don't know how the professionals do it, but when I did my website I just wanted it to look as clean and simple as possible...I don't think it looks too bad.

[vs346]

there's no replacement for someone who knows web design. depending on what you want your site to do for you, you can either play around a bit with frontpage as mentioned (but if you're having problems with simple graphical stuff...) or you can pay someone for what it's supposed to look like.

it just depends on if you want it just to showcase some photos, or for it to sell your photos/services.

professional is as professional does.

[MikeHoyer]

Well I'm OK with Frontpage, I can get something reasonably good looking I think, it's just trying to do something that doesn't look like someone elses! It's finding the quality time to put into it aswell... I should sit down with my brother and get a basic layout sorted, he knows a bit more than me...

[Cougar]

do u have an example of what you have up already?

[MikeHoyer]

I can do shortly, yeah.

[Truckosaurus]

The thing I'd love to see on a motorsport photo website is the feature of being able search on a vehicle or driver name, which return pictures from across several meetings (which is how most sites seem to be organised).

[MikeHoyer]

I'd like to do that... but don't know if I've got the skills just yet. But it's something I could implement in the future.

Anyone have any links to any templates where I can put my own text and links and pictures in?

[redshoes]

If you know anything about HTML I'd avoid Frontpage or any other editor that adds more code than is really needed. That's really just personal preference.

The golden rule for me is keep it simple. Unless you have a real need for fancy graphics, and not many people do, then don't use them. I simple, easy to navigate site will earn you more friends than a mess of javascript, flash, and needless eye-candy. The site is there to sell your skills as a photographer not your skills as a web designer. Pay a designer is you must but make sure you don't have to pay them again every time you want to upload a few more pictures.

Adding a search feature really needs to have a database driven site, which is obviously more involved. As an alternative you could incorporate a google search but that's not fool-proof.

[MikeHoyer]

I think what I'll do for now is just do something reasonably basic, just a decent banner, and a text menu, just so I've got something online that people can see. It's the photography that is most important after all.

[TerryC]

I found Paul's website pretty nice & neat.

[Ian_H]

I use Gallery to manage my photo website, you will need a hosting account with PHP available and once you get it set up it is very easy to run, you just need to upload your photos to it and it takes care of page layout, resizing, thumbnails etc also in the latest version there are skins available to change the look

Cheers
Ian

[pao]

Basic is good. As for gallery management software (not that you asked), I'm using Singapore on my page, which I've found to be simple to use and fairly easy to style along with some elegant premade templates being available. You can see in use in my photo gallery. I like it enough that I'm eventually going to change the photo gallery on a club webpage I do over to it. If you want to style your own page though, you'll find it difficult to get along without at least some knowledge of HTML and probably also CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, a styling language). A photo gallery is probably a fairly involved project for a first attempt at hand coding HTML+CSS, however. Of course, if you have the resources—mostly, time—to learn it, I would recommend it.

To do the searching, we're getting into PHP (which I'm still learning). I believe galleries like Gallery and Coppemine have this built in, but they are fairly complcated and difficult to make unique due to their involved templating schemes.

With that, I've got a webpage to go off and work on for a different club...the joys of being a student.

[MikeHoyer]

I've pretty much sorted my site now, just finalising the gallery style. Thanks for all your help!

[danccooke]

i do webdesign in my spare time (like i have much with work and marshaling!!) but my father is a photographer and i think photographic websites are a pain.
you need to take into account the size of the images that you are going to be putting online, do you want to change the images very often update with the latest etc etc.
this can become very time consuming and irritating if your not to flush with HTML design skills. Dreamweaver is an amazing application if you want to do it your self. or as i have now done for my father... www.fotopic.net its free really bloody easy and saves my time.
let us know when you have somthing up though would love to have a look.

[MikeHoyer]

I hate fotopic, resizes the pictures and stuff for you.

www.mdh-photography.co.uk is up, nothing spectacular, but it's there.

[MagnetON]

It's also worth looking at http://www.4homepages.de/ for 4images. That's the software we're using on here for the Gallery. It's fairly customisably and obviously you can restrict it so that only you can do uploads etc.

Xara Webstyle is also worth a look at, version 4 can create template based graphics and web pages along with navigation menus and gallery pages. Actually the Webstyle Gallery software is rather funky with thumbnails that open a new window onto the full size pic.