Help an amateur photo buff with these intertube thingies?

January 29, 2010 6:47 PM

I've been inspired by fellow mefite gomichild's site . I want to put together some of my photos for a site but don't know where to begin. I'm not confident with my design skills, and I wonder if I have any photos that are really good enough. I usually just post photos/snapshots on flickr for friends but I have had people contact me wanting to use my photos- so maybe they aren't so bad...Any suggestions for how to start? Anyone out there want to give me a (paid) hand putting a page together? You can see some of the photos at my flickr site(lots of snapshots here) or at JPG. I could put a few hours a day into a project. Right now I am oozing lack of confidence....
posted by ginky to media & arts (8 answers total)

Sorry not to have a better answer than this, but I have a friend who is a professional photographer, and the layout, look, and functionality of his site is almost identical to the one you linked. It's a little eerie, actually. So maybe it's a template?
posted by The World Famous at 7:20 PM on January 29, 2010

Maybe it is a template, I guess I could ask gomichild.
posted by ginky at 7:50 PM on January 29, 2010

It's not a template.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 8:33 PM on January 29, 2010

My site isn't a template - I hand coded the HTML and CSS and modified a jquery gallery script (Galleria).

It's a simple layout and not especially revolutionary - navigation and logo on left, thumbnails to the images, and the main image. My goal for the site was for the photographs to be the main design feature and to be easy to access.

Of course I had an advantage - I'm a web designer and producer by profession and have been making websites for years.

During my gallery script research though I did come across this site - http://jalbum.net/ - which might be a good place to start off.

As for the photographs I asked people who I feel were great photographers to review my selections and suggest edits and options. This helped me to get some perspective. Also my photographic focus is currently food - so I made that the priority, and included the others to show a range.

I use flickr as more of a playground for a huge range of subjects which I often have for different projects (such as my personal blog, tweeting, my kid's blog and bento site) so it's pretty overwhelming to use it as a portfolio as such. It was hard to narrow down into a portfolio site as such - but if you decide on your main focus and then some auxiliary categories it will be a lot easier to start to whittle your choices down.
posted by gomichild at 8:38 PM on January 29, 2010

Oh! I forgot to say - I'm very pleased that my site inspired you to express yourself creatively!
posted by gomichild at 8:46 PM on January 29, 2010

If you are looking to just get something up right now then I would consider a template company or use what a lot of other pro's are using, namely NeonSky and LiveBooks. Not super pricey but not exactly cheap. I use a company called qufoto which is along the same vein as the former but a lot cheaper.

The bigger question is what are you looking to do with the site? Are you considering photography as a career? Or is it a side business? Do you want to sell photos directly from the site or use it more as a marketing tool?
posted by WickedPissah at 10:49 PM on January 29, 2010

Thanks for the link and suggestions Gomichild I thought your site was too nice to be a template.
WP, I'm not considering a career in photography but rather a side business. I've sold some tourist-ey calendars and cards here locally for fun. I'm not sure but I am thinking about selling directly from the site rather than through a print on demand like imagekind.
posted by ginky at 11:05 PM on January 29, 2010

Gallery is an open-source project, has lots of plug-ins for various things, including shopping carts and the like. Bit of a learning curve, but pretty robust, and it's pretty easy to tweak the look of your site.

Another one is Indexhibit, but they'd like money for their software. Looks like all the sites built with it share the same navigation scheme.
posted by Bron at 10:01 AM on January 30, 2010