A Question of building a website through Zenfolio

<p>Dear all,<br>

After successfully selling some of my landscape photos through local art exhibitions in recent years, I am now considering to build my own photo website. I did some investigations and now tend to use Zenfolio as the host and start with either Unlimited or Premium plan. I have a question, which may be too simple, but I hope to get advices from experienced people:<br>

I like to have my own domain name such as http://yanzhangphotography.com (or something like that), how and where I can get my own domain name, and then put it into my Zenfolio hosted website?<br>

Thanks very much.<br>

Yan</p>

<p>Yan:<br /><br />You purchase your domain name through a registrar. There are quite a few to pick from. Some examples are Network Solutions (my favorite - http://www.networksolutions.com/ ) and GoDaddy. If Zenfolio will host your site all you need to get at the registrar is the domain name. Some registrars are very cunning (especially GoDaddy) in trying to get you to buy lots of different things you don't really need. <br /><br />Typically some hosting companies offer domain names as well, 1&1 comes to mind, but since you'll be hosting through Zenfolio that wouldn't be a good option for you. It is better to purchase your domain name through a registrar. You want your domain name to be yours to do with what you want as far as where you want to host it etc and that can sometimes be stymied when you purchase through a hosting provider.</p>

<p>Dear Mikael,</p>

<p>Thanks very much for your help. Now I have a better idea on this. I'll take a look at Network Soultions.</p>

<p>Earlier today I registered my website domain through GoDaddy.com. I am starting a small wedding photography business to supplement my retirement income. I will obviously want to have galleries and a way to sell prints. I will also need to password protect each gallery in order to protect the privacy of potential clients. I won't be interested in making the prints myself, but I will need to have a source to create wedding albums.<br /><br />Would a site like Zenfolio be a good place to start, or are there other websites that might be better suited to my needs? I might mention that I am nowhere near tech savvy enough to create my own website.</p>

<p>I've had a Zenfolio site for a few years - it's now nearly dormant for marketing strategy reasons, but I can share a few things that are worth thinking about.</p>

<p>1. ZF offers plans that allow unlimited storage. I like that a lot.</p>

<p>2.The "website" feature they offer is rudimentary at best. For example, there is NO blog feature, and that seems critical these days. Sure, you can create a WordPress site and link to it. For me, I've split my old ZF site into two SquareSpace sites. I will probably close the ZF site at some point.</p>

<p>3. The site is flash based. That has two important ramifications: First, flash doesn't index in search engines. There are some things ZF does to work around this, but my understanding is that this is still a serious problem.</p>

<p>Discussion in the forums has consisted of users asking ZF when they are coming up with a fix for the dismal search performance and near total silence from ZF. That's pretty disconcerting. If you have a great site that nobody can see in search results, it's pretty much an exercise in futility. As a direct result of that lack of action on the part of ZF, I'm actively working on a new site that won't be on ZF (or on SquareSpace - they have their own serious problems too)</p>

<p>Second, portable Apple devices like iPhone / iPod / iPad will not display flash. As these devices continue to be a significant player in the web browsing arena, that problem only grows larger. On my (nearly dormant) site, the slideshow doesn't play on my iPhone - it only shows one static image.</p>

<p>4. The shopping feature is very complete. Clients can order digital downloads with various licenses, prints fulfilled by Mpix or by you, as well as coffee mugs, mousepads, etc.</p>

<p>Overall, ZF is a partial solution to the need for complete website. There are a lot of things they have right. But the few problems they have - and have failed to address for far too long - are real deal breakers for me.</p>

<p>Charlie MacPherson<br />www.theamazingimage.com<br />www.thewildinfocus.com</p>

 

<p>I find that google indexes all the titles and captions of the photos in my Zenfolio galleries. <br>

One thing I don't like about Zenfolio, though, is that there's a 25 Mb limit on individual image file size, which means that I have to upload jpegs instead of tiffs. I believe that Smugmug does not have a limit.</p>