A website redesign has sucked up much of my attention in the last two weeks. Here's what I learned.
Livebooks is the big player for professional photography websites, for good reason. Their sites look fabulous, and they have great credibility in both the photography and client communities. A newer player is Rob Haggart's A Photo Folio. Rob made his name in the community through his A Photo Editor blog, where his acerbic, jaded take on the magazine business won him massive attention, which he has parlayed into his website venture.
Despite the tone of his personality, I decided his web platform would work better for me than Livebooks. What won me over was the video features. In a custom designed Livebooks site, you have to pay anytime you want to change a video. With A Photo Folio video changes were no harder than moving around an image portfolio.
Livebooks seems to be going through a growth spurt lately, and it was amazingly difficult to talk to a live person about their product. When a salesman complained to me about how busy he was, it was a sign that my business wasn't particularly needed and I wasn't going to get the attention I wanted.
I thought I would get more assistance at APF, but setting up a website with them is entirely a DIY construction. The help manual is a kludgy, ill-organized affair, and I wrote a lot of support tickets to try and make things work. I really needed handholding at times, particularly when the DNS transfer broke my email. The founder's personality is unfortunately front and center, as when I wrote a rant about how difficult Google Apps was to figure out, he replied, in essence, “Get your assistant to figure it out for you.”
Notwithstanding that, I still think A Photo Folio was the right choice. I'm considering making a separate site with them for my wedding photography, though I'm a little unhappy that I'll need to pay a second monthly hosting fee. I'm open to alternatives. Got any?
Photos seem somewhat slow to load. Was that a delay you built in between photos or just more links between my server and yours?
Posted by: Bruce Nall | December 16, 2009 at 06:15 PM
It's probably the size of my photos (1800 pixels) combined with the speed of your connection. I've done the best I could, but I can try and shrink them further.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | December 16, 2009 at 07:54 PM
What is the advantage of these photo hosting site, vs any other lower cost hosting sites. like bluehost etc.? Are they including website design in the price?
Posted by: Shaun | December 22, 2009 at 08:30 AM
The lower design fees are the big benefit to these sites. When I had my site reworked a year ago, on my own host, it cost me $3000. My new site cost me $1000 (doing it myself, with their templates), and $17/mo for hosting. Livebooks custom designs are $2000, and they have pre-designed templates for a monthly pay as you go fee, with no other charges.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | December 22, 2009 at 09:26 AM