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I hate my current website. www.shariphotos.com.
It is bland in presentation. The site looks defeated and on the verge of death. The flash images are small and pathetic. I want my images to jump out and smack you in the face! And the customer service is terrible. I have NEVER been able to get hold of these bastards and they never respond to emails. Myphotographer.com is crap. Cheap and crap. I pay $12 for them to host my images, take a 20% cut on my sales, and they never update the site with new templates. Myphotographer.com people- screw you.
I feel better now.
So I started the exhaustive search on finding a new home for my small biz.
First option: create my own site with Adobe Dreamweaver, or Microsoft Expressions. That lasted 2 days. I was way over my head with HTML, CSS, and coding, and with school starting up in 2 weeks, I knew it was going to be a frustrating experience with lots of kicking the cat- but we don't have a cat, and I won't kick my kid.
Also, all my web design people- Jamie the AD secretary and Darrin the Ipad Cover creator, strongly urged me to look at templates. They said I would totally kick the cat.
Hmm- templates- Not as easy as they seem. There are thousands of them out there and you are supposed to be able to just tweak and load them up. Well, I may still have a crack at that. I found a couple of really cool ones, but I just knew that with school starting now in 8 days, I would not be able to spend the time on this.
My friend Jennifer would have said "Shoulda done this in June". Yeah I know. Kick the cat.
So option three was to look into the website creation and hosting biz. There are loads of these sites that allow you to host images, create websites, sell images etc... The key is to find the right one that allows your own domain name- not some www.reazapics.com/smugpug/. ; Just doesn’t look cool. And more importantly- they respond when you have a question.
So first up- buy your own domain name. This was really easy and cheap. www.shariphotography.com is now mine for 2 years for $20. Godaddy is THE place for this according to my research. There are other sites for buying domain names- but this Everest.
In part 2 I will talk about the research on all the top sites photographers have on creating a kick ass site. And what it will cost.
One lucky ebiz is going to get Reza's $.
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