What is the best webhost and software for building a photography website?

I use clikpic to host my photography website, its quite easy to use and its simple. You can add products to site and it supports payment by google checkout and paypal. It costs from £35 per year in the UK but im not sure of the pricing in the US.

Almost any company that can host Ebusiness websites would be good. I would stick with some of the bigger companies to avoid the same situation in the future, however. Some good ones could be: Yahoo Web Hosting Crystaltech Microsoft Website Hosting I use Microsoft Website Hosting (free one) for my family website. A good place to see various sites is Here. Another way to go, of course, would be for her to host it herself. Most ISPs will sell you a static IP Address for this purpose. She could purchase a relatively cheap server and load Linux on it. I would suggest getting SUSE or Red Hat that way she could pay for tech support. Of course if she did this, she would have to do her own Ebusiness, so if she is not technically inclined ( or just doesn't have the time) the getting someone else to webhost is the best way. As far as software is concerned, I have a friend who uses Coppermine to host his photos online. I have not used this myself, but he swears by it.

This is a great question for the community. But the answer really depends on what you are trying to accomplish and how sophisicated you need the website to be. I am a very simple person and have used Microsoft FrontPage 2003 to design and build out my own website. I have also played around with Adobe Go Live CS2 since it came as a part of my Adobe Creative Suite CS2 Premium package. Both of these programs allow you to use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to see your work as you build which is alot easier than having to learn HTML, CSS, Java, and all of the other languages that can be used to build a site. Front Page 2003 is simple. It does not offer all of the dynamics and possiblities of Go Live, but with the proper understanding of HTML and other Plug Ins you can do pretty much everything you would need in Front Page. Feel Free to go to my site to see what I have done in FrontPage. www.bluehorizonphotos.com As far as hosting is concerned, there are so many to choose from I personally use Ipowerweb.com they have been very reasonable they even took the time to save me about $200 on my last renewal. The automatic renewal would have charged me 7.99/month for the year instead a rep called me and gave me 2 years at 4.99/month. And they support pretty much anything you can throw at them. I am not an expert in web design, but as you can see using what I have has produced in my opinion acceptable results that I am proud of.

I just retired after 21 years as a professional Portrait/wedding photographer, and I used homestead (www.homestead.com) for building my website. They offer a number of tools making it easy to design and build your own site. However, there not free, you'll have to check on the cost of a 1 year contract for the needs you desire. I'm pretty sure the link is correct, if not, put homestead into google.

I have been trying to decide how to host my own photography. I built a site before photo sharing was a big thing, but it is in a bit of disrepair, so I've looked at lots of alternatives. It really depends on what you want to do. Get your photos seen by lots of people Think about using a site like Flickr .com or Zooomr .com. These sites are community oriented and can give good exposure. Zooomr is looking at ways for photographers to offer their photos up as stock, but I don't believe they do this yet. Flickr has no monetary component yet, but it is integrated with services to allow for prints. This is good for friends and family. Post pictures there and let them get their own prints. The biggest downside for many photographers is you don't control the presentation. Both sites leave a little to be desired, design wise. You certainly can do a more dramatic presentation if you build your own site. Sell photos online The best site I've seen for actually selling photos is Smugmug .com. They have several account levels. At the top end ($150/year) you can set prices on each individual photo and you earn money. There is a base price that you can't go below. You earn 85% of your price minus the base price (e.g., base is $ 1 .00, you set price to $ 2 .00, you earn $ 0 .85. ($2 - $1) * 85%). There are no free accounts, but there are no ads, either. Lots of customization options and a full API for the programmer types. I've used them and I like them, but I'm not looking to sell prints or images (yes, you can sell downloads of your photos, too), so I don't want to spend $150/year just to host images. Do something custom If you want to completely do your own thing, the best thing to do is go with a hosting provider like Lunarpages .com. I've had great luck with them. $ 6 .95/month if you subscribe for 2 years. Lots of options, great support. No complaints. Of course it takes a little more work to put this together, but you have complete control. The easiest way then to build a gallery is to use Adobe Lightroom (which you should be using for editing your photos) and use their web gallery feature. Get the gallery you want and then just upload it. In fact you can even get custom galleries at lightroomgalleries .com Editing software: Adobe Lightroom Now the actual photo editing software you want to use is Adobe Lightroom. I've done digital photography for seven years and I've spent a lot of hours learning Photoshop. In the past few months I haven't edited a single photo in Photoshop. I do it all in Lightroom now (technically it's called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but I find that confusing, so I just call it Lightroom). Lightroom is simply amazing. Not only does it help catalog your collection so you can find photos years later, it also has super intuitive editing controls. This is truly the darkroom of digital photography. Why is it better than Photoshop? It's tuned for photography, not all kinds of digital manipulation. For instance, there's a "Vibrance" slider which does a smart saturation enhancement whereby only colors not already saturated, and not flesh tones, have their saturation increased. Very useful. If you aren't using Lightroom, take some time to read through these sites: lightroom-news .com and George Jardine on Lightroom and Digital Photography (www. mulita .com/blog/). Great, great stuff. Good luck on setting up your site. Photo sharing services are hot right now, so there's going to be new stuff every month. I would say the most important thing to do is to pick something and go with it. You could paralyze yourself trying to pick the perfect service. Find a solution that fits 80% of what you need and build a small site to test it. If it works, go all out. If not, try another one. Just make sure you actually get started.

You could try Office Live Small Business - there is a different photo website in their customer gallery. They give you templates and tools to help create the website and the online community looks to be very helpful with the demos and Q&A – you can search by keyword.

Hey guys check out a new tool to showcase your work online- Pixpa Read the article on TheNextWeb: Its Awesome ; recently found on internet thought of sharing it. http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/25/meet-pixpa-a-killer-online-showcase-tool-for-photographers/ http://www.pixpa.com ; Free hosting on their domain like yourname.pixpasites.com and a software tool to manage and customize anything to everything.

As an experienced webmaster I recommend BH web hosting which I’m sure it would work for you and fulfill all your requirements. They have a really great offer for hosting & I have used them for over 3 yrs now, and have never had a single problem with them. You can reach reviews about this web hosting provider and its latest DISCOUNT COUPONS at: http://www.threehosts.com/reviews/1st Only $3.95 /month (with discount coupon) ******IMPORTANT******** * This service was awarded the “Best Web Hosting OF The Year”. ***************************** Hope this helps.