I recently setup my website through photodeck.com. That was a piece of cake to setup. All the setup tools are so intuitive and well thoughout that it made the experience a very pleasant one. 14 days free and $9.99 a month thereafter for the basic package which will probably be sufficient for me for sometime to come.

It is at his most basic setup for the moment but it has all the necessary components to make sales happened if I can get some traffic to come my way. I will eventually make it a bit nicer.   

I used smugmug for sometime, although it is not directed at the same crowd, I found photodeck far more intuitive and easier to work with. Here it is:

http://denispepin.com

http://denispepin.com

Very well done and super content.

I like the site, very nice job IMO! Prices are reasonable. I will add it to my list of microstock resources.

On the downside, I think your License Agreement needs some work, eg "The following is an unexhausted list of image usages not permitted under any license:" is not very good English legalese. Maybe go to elance and pay a lawyer-type to touch it up?

Congratulations! Very nice, clean look, fast, and easy to navigate.

I like the site, very nice job IMO! Prices are reasonable. I will add it to my list of microstock resources.

On the downside, I think your License Agreement needs some work, eg "The following is an unexhausted list of image usages not permitted under any license:" is not very good English legalese. Maybe go to elance and pay a lawyer-type to touch it up?

Thank you for adding my site to your list. I agree with the License Agreement needing some work.  I'll check elance to see what can be done. Thank you as well to microbius, oboy and dhanford for your positive comments.

The site looks amazing!

All the best!!

Did you take the 10$/month (light) plan on Photodeck or the 30$/month (pro) plan? 360$ per year looks more expensive than Photoshelter but they don't take a share on the sales. Also, the 10$/month plan just comes with 10GB and that's a bit limited for hires Canon 5D shots at jpg 12.

Thank you Cobalt and Karimala!!


@AttilaTheNun, I still have 8 days "Pro Plan" free and I haven't bought a plan yet. You don't even need a credit card nor a financial commitment to get started. Photodeck would probably simply delete my site if I don't make a commitment before the 8 days expires. This is a great way to test their tools and interface without losing money...only some of your time if you don't like it.....and you'll find out quickly.

Regarding the 10GB plan, this is probably a good fit for me because it took me 5 years to build a collection of 1300 photos which amount to 6.17GB. This is only a small part of my life. For me this is a no-brainer, so far, this is the best economical way to showcase my work.  For some photographers doing "for hire" work, stock for corporate clients, editorial, weddings, family photos etc...involving a higher volume of images, may not be the best economical solution, but then again you always get what you pay for......I think the 10GB plan is a real bargain and the 40GB plan is priced just right for what you get.

Denis

Your site looks great Denis.  Congratulations!

Thank you Lisa!

I agree - very nice and clean site. You have definitely got me thinking that this is the way to go.

A question though - how do you start to get traffic to your site? I can understand how you can create a blog, put lots of interesting content there, and get a high(ish) Google ranking in searches. But a photo site simply has keywords and descriptions. Little reason for anyone to link to your site, and hence the chance of an image appearing high on a search doesn't look good. I guess that Google images will search and index the site, but then your images will be scattered among all the Flickr images that come up on Google Images.

I'd hate to do all the work to create my own stock site but get no traffic.

Steve

Thank you Steve!

Before I answer your question regarding traffic, I would like to go back to what I said regarding Photodeck 10GB plan. I indicated earlier that this was a great bargain, however after finding out a few things, now I think that the 10GB plan is a good but not an excellent deal. The reason is after I decided to pay for the $9.99 a month plan and started the procedure, it showed me what I would be missing once I downgrade from the free 14 days pro account to the basic account.

I though from what I read originally that the basic difference between pro and basic accounts was a downgrade to 10gb allowance, 2 price profiles instead of unlimited and some other minor things which did not concern me.  I figure that 10gb and 2 price profiles were sufficient for me. However, what was revealed is that in addition to the above mention, the basic profile does not allow to keep my url denispepin.com as it would revert to denispepin.photodeck.com, I would get only one price profile and most importantly, image buyers would not be able to download automatically and directly from my site meaning that human intervention would be needed. To me this is no longer an amazing deal. I don't blame photodeck as I still believe in their product and decided to go along for one extra month with the pro plan at $29.99.  After one month, If I don't make a sale I will reconsider if this is really worthwhile for me.

Regarding traffic: Get a short url, a clean site and spread the word and your link as much as you can.  This forum is a small but good start. Look at how many have read this thread so far. There are other places out there and it is up to you to find them. Another way I figured recently, Google make it possible to search your images by the image itself not keywords. This way I was able to find hundreds of sites that have my images without any credit to me or any agency. Because those images are my photos without any credit this is giving me a good excuse and an opportunity to contact site owners, editors or webmaster to let them know that those images are mine and that if they want anymore they can go to denispepin.com.

Of course facebook is another way as you can create a business page linked to your site. There are tons of things you can do but of course this does not mean you'll get traffic. You can only try your best. Like I said, if I don't sell anything in a month time I will reconsider. So far, according to photodeck traffic interface, I had approx 150 visitors for which many checked prices, no doubts many from here too. As well google is picking up my site on its first page when I simply google my name denis pepin.

Denis

I just looked at your animal thums. I don't see any watermark on them?

Usually most agency's thumbnails don't have watermark. My thumbnails are 175 pixels the widest. Shutterstock can be set at 150 the widest. If it become a concerns I could set my thumbnails at 100 pixels the widest.  I don't think there is much value for someone to steal such a small image.  Plus it is either the watermark would cover most of the small image making the thumbnail hard to see or proportionally like the big image then you would not see the watermark.

Good work.

Thank you Shadysue!

Quote from: cybernesco on November 27, 2011, 17:11

I though from what I read originally that the basic difference between pro and basic accounts was a downgrade to 10gb allowance, 2 price profiles instead of unlimited and some other minor things which did not concern me.  I figure that 10gb and 2 price profiles were sufficient for me. However, what was revealed is that in addition to the above mention, the basic profile does not allow to keep my url denispepin.com as it would revert to denispepin.photodeck.com, I would get only one price profile and most importantly, image buyers would not be able to download automatically and directly from my site meaning that human intervention would be needed. To me this is no longer an amazing deal.

Thanks for that info, it's worse than I thought. So the lite plan is just a teaser to lure you in the expensive plan. I read their offer carefully at http://www.photodeck.com/features/ but it shows 2 price profiles. You always have to dig deeper to find the catches. So the 2 profiles are a lie. Fine.
The URL at their site makes the lite offer useless: you will lose all your external links and Google images traffic if they go out of business or when you find out that the 360$/year "deal" is no match for Photoshelter at all.
Their hosting offers are a joke, especially in the EU. For their price of 2.5 Gb extra, you can get decent full hosting in the EU. My current hosting in the US is 3$/month, unlimited domains.
I was interested in their SEO manual but you need to sign up with Zuckerman's monster Facebook, so no thanks. Photoshelter has excellent SEO and design manuals and they just need your email.
When Photodeck came online here in their early stage, I thought already there was something fishy about it. The other guys (forgot the name) started free too, then started to charge, then went out of business. Once bitten...

Why not just take proper hosting and buy a proven framework like Ktools or CMSaccount for a 1-time fee? You can change hosting as you wish and the links are permanent since they are towards your own domain.

As you say, the lite plan is in fact a teaser.  Regardless of what happens, I will keep my url as I will not go back with someone else url. Therefore whenever I make the decision to make a change, it will be just a matter of directing my url someplace else and the content and simplicity of the site will be the same just with a different host. I was thinking about ktools to build my site as well before photodeck. When I have more time, I'll check them out some more. For the moment, I only have $29.99 commited with photodeck for only one month. To me this is no big deal and a learning experience as I can now investigate the potential of having my site out there. And If I don't make a sale within a month I may reconsider having a site at all. If I decide not to have a site or have a site later on, I will have spent $29.99 only. The url denispepin.com I will always keep it registered in my name regardless of what happens. Who knows maybe I'll start a knitting site 10 years from now....and denispepin.com might come handy.....

Did I mention that my site is going?...and it works....

Not even the 1979 version?