MicrostockGroup

Hi all,

I have a personal website which is under eternal construction, since I created it. Of course, it didn't bring any money at all, only 2-3 referals at Fotolia. However, I spent zero time for developing or promoting it, creating a selective portfolio with my best work, put it in categories - nothing.
However, in february I am to renew the hosting if I still want to have the site.
Also, I looked at Smugsmug. For somewhere around $150 one can have a full pro account with a lot of goodies, shopping cart, portfolio, the lot.
Bluehost is asking me some $150 too for renewing the contract.
So for the same money I can get faster a reasonable good looking site on smugsmug.

Now my questions are: do you use smugsmug? Have you sold directly from there images? Anything bad I should know about them?

I am also considering to simply not renew my contract with bluehost and forget about doing anything with a personal site. But I still think it's good to have a portfolio with selected images split in categories rather than have someone interested trying to figure out the best stuff from thousands of images in my microstock portfolio.

I just want to use the website for photography. I am kinda reluctant to believe that I'll make some time to build the website I currently have if I haven't done it already in the last year

And it costs 150$, as much as smugsmug.

I just looked at the price in my account - would be 107$ for 12 months to renew. I have the platinum package which means is pretty much loaded with everything. Of which I am using... somewhere around 1% I guess.

Anyway, the point was - would smugsmug be a viable alternative? I need to build the website fast, to have it promoted, to have a shopping cart based on paypal and to do all these without wasting too much time or programming it myself (I'm having enough of this at my main job).

Haven't tried Smugmug but I'm evaluating Photoshelter. Full buyer self-service stock RM, RF, and print purchasing just like a stock agency site.

The features are excellent but the most important thing for me is Search Engine Optimization and the results aren't so good so far.  They have good SEO tools but seem to have poor indexing with search engines. It's only been a week but the images should have been indexed within a couple of days.

I also evaluated LicenseStream/ImageSpan and while it shows potential the website integration, SEO, and buyer experience is pretty clunky. Maybe they'll get it right in version 3.

Zenfolio pricelist and feature comparison:
http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/pricing.aspx

Only you have the answer, what type of website do you need, how much marketing are you prepared to do, can you transfer your old domain name to SmugMug, how much non photographer traffic can you send to your website?

It is not just a matter of setting up SmugMug and the buyers will come, you said "to have it promoted" who is doing the promotion, SmugMug only provide the software they do not market your images for you, I read that they add 700000 images a month and have over 7bn images stored, in 2006 they were uploading 10tb of images a month, so they cannot promote portfolios, their SEO prefixes with SmugMug/Photographer name.

If you have images that may sell as prints and you can market them then SmugMug might work for you, to get any value from SmugMug you need to drive the traffic yourself and not rely on casual browsers or search results for general images, if you have a niche market, cover events or local interest subjects and will market the website then it is a good move, if you just want a portfolio website then there are many cheaper options like ClickPic and many other Portfolio websites.

As already said shared hosting is very cheap, a bit of space, a portfolio template, upload and online, many ISP will have self installing software like gallery2, Joomla, wordpress etc: so you are paying to much, the key is what do you really need and how will you market your portfolio.

Have a read of this Microsock Insider post, and some of the links there might help you.

Regards

David

like others have said you are way over paying for your hosting.

but I think you have already made the most important point:


Why?

if you had no time or motivation to run your own site before then renewing is probably not a good idea. but neither is spending all that money on smugmug or photoshelter. If you don't have 'time' to sort, upload AND also promote your port, the it's does not matter where it might be. perhaps stick to letting an agency do the selling for you or make a proper plan and set some realistic goals. smugmug and those like it will take care of the technical aspects but either self hosted or paid service you need to do that marketing/promotion work - or pay someone to do it - that marketing strategy will define the requirements of your chosen hosting solution