Which do you use to design your website?

<p>I currently rely almost entirely off Adobe Lightroom to manage my website, the only problem is I don't gain a lot of traffic through search engines. Uploading galleries are quick and easy, and so is the option to use PayPal with customers who want individual pictures. Recently I created my blog using WordPress to attract search engines and this makes it easy for announcements, but my concern with Lightroom is you are limited to look like others who also use it. <br>

What is your favorite program, template or design to use for showcasing your photos and generating web traffic? <br>

BTW- my site is: <a href="http://www.premierephoto.us">www.premierephoto.us</a></p>

 

<p>I would suggest that design is quite distinct from the matter of generating web traffic, though it is true to some extent that good design (and good content) will increase the popularity of your site. How do people find out about your site? Just looking at the millions of pages that come up in a typical SERP (search engine result page) on a keyword(s) tells you that SEO (search engine optimization, the largely smoke and mirrors game of convincing folks that adjusting keywords or other text in your website will bring you closer to that ideal first SERP, top of page) is unlikely to help, particularly in the short term. Viral advertising, word of mouth basically, works well in and out of the Internet world, i.e., if people are talking about your site, more people will visit it, and more people will talk, and so on. Having your website URL on all media you use is also a good idea (things like business cards, your email signature, professional brochures, signage, etc.). Web 2.0 channels are increasingly important, so put up YouTube video and mention the site, have a Facebook presence, Twitter folks about updates to your site. All that being said, if you want instant results, you cannot beat pay per click, e.g., Google Adwords. It is easy to set up and use and you can control the amount you spend by day and month in order to basically bid for the keywords most likely to catch Internet searchers and present them with a blurb on your site at the top of the first page of search results (and Google provides free tools to tell you what the trafiic is on particular key words, as well as the typical cost to bid sufficiently high to win that keyword at a given time).<br>

Gary Bentley</p>

<p>see similar thread almost the same (<a href="q-and-a-fetch-msg?topic_id=2401&msg_id=00TpAR">link</a> )</p>

<p>Jared,</p>

<p>I use LR to create the simpleviewer galleries that are embedded in my webpage. This way, the gallery still has that good clean flash design, but it is embedded in a purely html site so browsers can pick up on the text.</p>

<p>Take a look here http://www.geneboaz.net/seniorgallery/seniorgallery.html</p>

<p>Feel free to look at the source code on the gallery pages to see how I did it. Its actually pretty easy once you see it done and if you know some basic html. If you have any questions, feel free to email me.</p>

<p>Sorry my link above was somehow broken. These are not cross-postings, but merely people discussing the same issue. Here's another try at a <a href="00TpAR?unified_p=1">link</a></p>

<p>I produced my first website ten years ago, hand scripted in HTML, which seemed to me to be the only way to go back then. I don't think I ever got more than 500 visitors.<br>

Once you start learning HTML you realize that you need to know CSS. So I learned CSS. To turn CSS into a powerful tool you need to know a little JavaScript. So I learned some JavaScript. So in 2002 I was able to produce a better site that attracted a lot more visitors. I also produced http://www.photolucid.com which still exists - albeit in a slimmed down form - and still attracts visitors by the hour, if not minute. In 2003 I produced another site that received around 40k visitors in the first month, and still occasionally picks up over 1000 visitors a day, although it often plummets to 50 a day.<br>

To make websites really functional you need to learn a server-side scripting language. So I have now acquired a reasonably solid grasp of PHP.<br>

What I have learned is that if you want visitors, you must create something at least a bit unusual, if not unique, built around a concept. Simply sticking images in galleries in today's Flickr mad world might be a fun thing for the relations, but isn't going to generate serious traffic. Unless your one-word name begins with R and ends in N, that is.<br>

Most cheap website kits will not help you to produce anything that doesn't look remarkably like a lot of other websites that no one visits. If you are work shy, but have money, get a young, innovative, but not yet established web developer/designer to do the job for you. Otherwise get some very big books. Or at least learn some basic HTML alongside Flash.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>My apologies, but at 07:05 non-Greenwich Meantime, I accidentally dropped a post into this thread which was meant for the 'Creation' thread. <br>

On the topic of web traffic, my view is that if the site is right the viewers will come. You may need to find ways of kick starting it, but word-of-mouth is what will take it up.<br>

Use http://www.alexa.com to check the performance of photography sites you know about.</p>

<p>I actually run several photography websites, so the answer depends on the type of site.<br>

If I'm selling photos - I use Jalbum with an Ordering template as a seperate function of my website.<br>

If I'm showing off content, but not sales, I'm using a CMS/Blog called serenditpity.<br>

If it's for my photoclub (forums) I'm using phpBB (although SMF is atractive too)<br>

For what it's worth - I tried joomla, other CMSes and the few photo-gallery CMSes out there and found them to be too complicated and too much work.</p>

<p>Good job that you already setup a WordPress blog, which can help position you - remember to use the keywords and categories, and link to your main website from every post. Also agree with Gary on the pay per click - easy entry to the market for a very small budget to get some exposure while building up natural forms of traffic. Apologies for the self promotion, but I hope that my <a href="http://photographers-seo.com">photographers seo book</a> can help you on your quest for search engine optimization. Note that no link credit gets passed within the forum posts, so that does not work for link building ;-)</p>