Ways to do gallery/portfolio/website?

<p>As I try to expand my hobby into something that might actually make a couple of bucks (if for no other reason than to help support the hobby!), I am not sure of how to do things and I'm hoping you can give me some insight.</p>

<p>My long term goal would be to have a site that is what I see becoming the norm: artist uploads pictures, proofs with watermarks are created and displayed, customer browses and choses the ones they want and order prints. While this seems to work, in this age of all things digital, many people want pictures for their computer desktops, or for a digital photo frame, or a forum avatar. Obviously a print doesn't work unless they scan it, which starts to border on some copyright laws I would assume. So how does one plan/setup for such things? </p>

<p>My short term goal is to have a site that I can post pictures to and allow people to browse and actually download a medium quality version. I plan to do this for friends events (party, cookout, family reunion) as well as some charity events with the idea that the more I shoot the better I get and by doing so I can start to get my name out there a little more. For these types of things, something like Flickr or even as simple as Dropbox would work. But what I would want is a way to keep track of the number of visitors as well as what files people are actually downloading so I can use that information to help me improve. Are there ways to do this or places that host with this kind of model, giving the details, with minimal costs? Are there other ways/approaches?</p>

<p>In the end, if I found something that let me start with the short term approach (or similar) with a very low cost and would allow me to expand to the longer term goal with fees being based on orders, I think I would have the best of both worlds for me. But again, I'm not sure if this is even the right approach or if it is feasible.</p>

<p>I would appreciate any input that anyone is willing to share so that I can set things up the right way from the start.</p>

<p>Thanks!<br>

Scott</p>

<p>This probably should have gone in the "Business of Photography" forum. My apologies. </p>

<p>Scott, Search the Wedding Forum on Photo.net for answers. You shouldn't have any trouble finding numerous posts about what you want to do. The link below is to one company mentioned, but there are many others offering the same services:</p>

<p>http://sales.simplephoto.com/index-2.html</p>

<p>Bill - Thanks! I'll do a bit more digging/searching and see what I can come up with. I have not given this much thought, so posted a question before I did much digging. Hand slapped! Sorry for my knee jerk question.</p>