Shari Photography: August 2010

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Matt and Whitney Kick Ass

2010 Sunset Hills Triathlon

Whitney takes first place.

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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Hello Cece

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Thursday, August 26, 2010

How to setup a Photographers Website part 2

Okay- it's been a long and wonderful journey trying to figure all this out. I've had to learn a whole new set of vocabulary terms and tons of technical stuff. And I've loved it. Once I narrowed my choices down to 2-3 companies, it was very tough becuase so little separated them.

This is what I've gained from the experience and I will be happy to share in more detail with others- just get hold of me.

GoDaddy is still THE place to host, register domain names, and get email accounts. They also provide a ton of E commerce items. But the reason they rock is you can talk to someone every time you call and they are all amazing. The GoDaddy crew are so helpful and the wait time- even at high traffic call times- was never more than 4 minutes. It's like they really want to help you. ANd they do help. There is no passing the client to another techy. They deal with the problem and fix it.

And now the choice I made for my site: Shari Photography, www.shariphotography.com - after weeks of debate, comparisons, emails and phone calls with the developers- Portfoliositez. I really like this company. The offered a series of great looking templates, at a good price, with cool features. But the main reason- Customer Service baby! They don't do phone calls, but they ROCK the emails. I have sent a dozen email questions, and they have all been answered within an hour or less. These are not form emails, but acuall answers to my questions. Like Godaddy, they act like they really want to help.

How hard was the loading of the template to Godaddy? Eazzzzy. I emailed the domain name and password to Portfoliositez and 24 hours later I was live. They did everything.

The Other choice was Creativemotiondesign. I was really torn between these 2. CMD had cool templates, a rockin customer service which included email and phone calls. But in the end, the $50 difference and the extreme customer service of Portfoliositez swayed me.

For my shoping chart I am using Instaproofs. There are many choices out there- but I am using these guys becuase they have no upload limit, no monthly fee, and a standard %15 fee. I am also in total control of the image output which is very important to me.

Now the fun begins. Customizing my template to match my needs. That includes creating a logo, uploading images, and writing text. I am looking forward to it.

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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

An Insane Artist.

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Monday, August 9, 2010

How to set up a Photographers Web Site (Part1)

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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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