Website - a beginning

Folks I don't know a great deal about having my own website so any help appreciated.

I want to create my own business, so it is there and available for use if and when I need it although I have no plans to run this as job proper. I have been offered work training and consultancy and it would be good to be able to back this up with a website e.g. BlackCloud training dot com!. I intend to create a business account to facilitate the odd payment i might get for this type of occasional work.

Seperately when I have gone to events, re-enactments etc. I have been asked where my pictures will appear and can people get a copy (since I acquired a biggish wide aperture telephoto people think I must be a real tog! ) I would like a website where I can post pictures and maybe allow people to download smallish copies but maybe buy prints or bigger downloads. This isn't likely to be much throughput as I am hardly a 'name'.

In each case I would like to have the site reliably and securely hosted and have my own domain name e.g. BC-consultancy.com and seperately BC- rubbishpictures.com.

I want the website to look good, be stable with permanent name so i can get business cards etc. but like everyone I want this to be at minimal cost. I am hearing stories of people paying £1k to have a website built and others suggesting these online templates can be fine and they only cost a few quid.

Any comments, ideas, what are the differences?

I think a lot of the photographers use templates or other off-the-shelf packages for their photography websites as they are cheaper and often easier to use and set-up. If you google 'photography website templates' you should get a good list of them. Their may be a slight learning curve but it shouldn't be too difficult.

If you want a custom website then yes it will cost over a grand, depending on who you go with and what the final spec is. I would probably only recommend this if it's your full time occupation and you already have had a brand designed.

I'm a staunch fan of Smugmug.com It allows you to custom design your website to allow access or restricted access to any photo you upload. Smugmug allows unlimited uploads and unlimited sise photos. There's an additional fee to upload RAW files. I've been with them for 3 years now and anout to renew yet again. They back uo your uploads at three different locations for security of your valuable work. www.smugmug.com

You can easily make a website using a blog for free.
You can then buy a domain name very cheaply that directs to that blog.
You can also buy templates etc to make it look more professional if you like.
I have lots of little 'websites' (for my choir, my music teaching business, judo club, etc etc) all made using wordpress.com and I know that there are a lot of pro photographers that use it too. There are places like tofurious that sell pro photography templates for wordpress, but I haven't got that far with my photography to need a website.

I have been exploring the new pro gallery being offered by Photobox.
You can upload galleries of pictures, give people the link to your gallery (or have a link on your blog) and they order the pictures they want Photobox prints and delivers straight to them.
You can set the pricing you want and get any profit.
You can have different pricings for different galleries if you like. You can also choose what size prints wil be available to the customer.

Oh and the Photobox progallery is free at the moment. I believe they will be charging in the future but I seem to remember reading that if you make a gallery now it will remain free in the future. I could have that wrong though.

knowing a fair bit about visual communication and web, Id maybe reconsider using 'black cloud' in the url as there is a lot of negative connotations of such a name.

...thanks Dan but that was only said in jest as is the moniker anyway... You should also read a bit of sci fi - The Black Cloud from the 60's

Ideally then, you want 1 hosting account which will allow multiple domains/websites to be hosted like Godaddy which I use. I think the American hosts are much better value and certainly cheaper than UK hosts. Some have there servers in Europe but should not make any differance even if based in the USA.

You will have to decide whether to build your own website from scratch or use a free template which you will still have to customise anyway, or have someone design it for you.

I built dejavuphoto.net from scratch, very simple, only used layers and the main viewing gallery comes from lightroom. Recently I have been using wordpress templates for my other sites www.grantglendinning.ws and www.glendinning.eu and those are certainly light years ahead of anything I could do, but to customise them to your liking you have to get under the bonnet and edit CSS but if you mess up you8 might not have a website to show.

I think some hosts also offer free website starter pages as well but not sure how good or usefull they might be.

I had a Photium one - they seem quite popular.

I use webs.com for my photo site and also a business site; they offer a free option which has the usual Google ads smeared on it or a premium option. Either way, they are very easy to use and look pretty good too! Here's the addresses of my two sites, to give you an idea how they look...
firstly, my photo site: http://kentishman.webs.com
and then my business site: http://simply-wills.webs.com