website advice

[Harvey_nikon]

Hi all,

I am currently in the process of developing my own website just for my photography. However, I want to get it all planned before I start building it.

Currently looking at a place to showcase my photos, however, if I get the chance to go pro and start selling images/services I won't want to totally rebuild my site.

So, I've done lots of searching and reading, made a list of options such as using premade blogging software to full on ecommerce software.

Things I want:

good gallery options.
easily customisable so I can make it look like I want
Option to create customer areas with passwords
the ability to take orders/ecommerce/shopping cart.

If I can't find one package that does the lot I will have to look at taking different options and putting them together to make them work.

So, what are people's suggestions? I want to see what you say compared to the research I've done

 

[Oli R C]

Well I went down the Gallery2 route, embedded into my Joomla site. Does all the things you're looking for, and I've always been very happy with it. Link is in my siggy if you want to see an example.

 

[Craikeybaby]

If you want it to go fully featured my advice would be to use one of the existing services, such as Photoshelter etc. I'm pretty experienced when it comes to websites and they do it much better than lots of different plug ins would manage.

 

[surrealillusions]

Wordpress

Open source (free), and tons of free plugins and addons out there for photography and e-commerce

 

[stephenrapoport]

Wordpress is superb but you need to be fairly technically literate to make full use of it. Mr Site is a good one if you want a simple interface