grizzly1

<p>Thanks everyone for the great suggestions. I've marked them all down and will be starting my adventure this weekend. Thanks much!!!</p>

<p>The family and I are taking a trip to Alaska in a few weeks, we're looking for suggestions for the best place to photograph those awe inspiring locations. We'll be RV'ing around Anchorage, Talkeetna, Denali, Seward, Homer, and Kenai. </p>

<p>Are there any must-see places I should target? </p>

<p>You can use Wordpress with a theme from ThemeForest. They have some crazy themes that are really sharp and easy to setup (2 days of tinkering). </p>

<p>I use Smugmug. Works great and is very easy to use. Has a TON of features and can be themed however you like. I've even integrated it with my Wordpress site so it looks like you've never left. http://tfxStudio.com, click on the Gallery link and it takes you to my Smugmug Gallery. </p>

<p>David,<br>

You can get a very complete solution for selling products using Wordpress and WooCommerce plug-in, both free. It immediately integrates with Paypal and I think Authorize.net. It's very easy to setup as I've done it for us at http://thewildgrizzly.com and only cost me $50 for the WordPress theme and the hosting ($5 a month?). However, this is a product based e-commerce solution. I'm not sure if you're selling photos you already have made or if you're selling prints to customers. WooCommerce is very robust, but it's not specifically a photo e-commerce plug-in so you couldn't use it to select a photo and then put it on a mug or mouse pad. But you could sell mugs and mouse pads with a photo on it if the customer put the photo # in the comments of the order. </p>

<p>If you're selling prints or mugs and such to your customers with their photo on it, maybe contact Smugmug support. I THINK they have subscriptions with more advanced shopping cart configurations that let you configure different items and send all orders to you rather than their printer. I set something something like this up for http://johnfinleyphotographer.com so fulfillment was handled by us and they handled the payment processing. But I would check with them just to be sure. <br>

<br />Hope that helps. </p>

<p>I've ready similar books on UI and Usability. I'll have to take a look at "Don't Make Me Think"<br>

Tis a shame you can't move to Wordpress, I fully understand the need to keep the links alive as they've already been spidered by the search engines. For others who might want to update or create their own site, I'll provide some quick tips from my experience.</p>

<p>I've successfully launched numerous content and photography sites using Wordpress in just a few hours. http://TheWildGrizzly.com, http://tfxStudio.com, and http://JohnFinleyPhotographer.com are just a few examples. I've deployed at least a dozen more for customers, friends and family.</p>

<p>We've mixed the gallery capability with Wordpress' inherent content management tools. The "net" provides endless themes and plug-ins you can either get free or inexpensively. There are thousands of free plug-ins for Wordpress providing endless types of functionality and apps for your site. I get a lot of my themes from ThemeForest for around $50-60 a theme. The themes usually allow you to upload your own logo and modify most of the settings. I admit that Wordpress' administration is not completely intuitive, but learning their admin screens is certainly easier than learning how to develop or paying a company a couple thousand to do it.</p>

<p>Wordpress is perfect for photographers (as well as any other business). In the case of tfxStudio.com and JohnFinleyPhotographer, I've integrated a Smugmug gallery into the site (http://jfinley.smugmug.com in the case of tfxStudio). If you click on the Gallery link on these sites you're taken to a Smugmug site behind the scenes. We've kept the themes the same so it appears you're still on the same site, although it's not perfect it does the job well. Smugmug has a very robust image management and printing solution making it a great choice for an out-of-the-box solution for photographers. All I did was modify my Smugmug theme to look like my main site. The entire setup only took me a couple of days of tinkering and I was up and running.</p>

<p>There are lots of other out-of-the-box solutions for photographers, I've just found this path to be the most economical and flexible. If anyone needs any additional information on how to make all this happen, just give me a shout.</p>

<p>The one thing I don't do well is the rich content that you have. I'll admit I hate to type content, just not one of my strong points. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Bob,<br>

Awesome content on your site. Way to go! Quick pointers...</p>

<ul>

<li>Reduced the noise</li>

<li>Simply the color palette: 4-5 main theme colors max throughout the entire site.</li>

<li>Use different font sizes to draw the visitors eye, but keep it under control </li>

</ul>

<p>I see that you're doing this economically. Koodoos and nice job. It's harder than most people think to create and maintain a website. You've done a lot and your content is fantastic. I would recommend at one point moving to a Wordpress, Joomla or similar Content Management System. They will do most of the work for you and have endless themes, plug-ins and applications that will do everything you need. </p>

<p>Ryan,<br>

Your site is nice. Although I would remove the video and hello from the home page. In my opinion one should feature their work in big and bold. In today's world of tech (I've been in it for 30 years), the Web 2.0 look-and-feel is now the way to go. What does that mean? It means large simple text, lots of white space, low in graphics and noise. You're site offers much of that, however I would enlarge the navigation and font size. <br>

Your photos are nice and the gallery works well. <br>

I always steer people towards using tools such as WordPress and/or Smugmug wherever possible. You can purchase very nice themes and setup a great website with a gallery very quickly. All with esthetics that are usually very nice. Places like ThemeForest.net offer very nice out-of-the-box themes and I've used them on many projects. Wordpress can be a bit slow on the load, but its capability to create and manage a site is awesome. For photographers, I've combined the use of WordPress with a themed Smugmug and it works great. You can see how we did it at the sites below. This combination provides a easy to use an esthetically pleasing site with the power of the Smugmug gallery. <br>

tfxStudio.com and JohnFinleyPhotographer.com</p>

<p>Hope that helps. I'm a 30 year veteran of technology so feel free to shoot me any questions. </p>