wchs1961 Loc: Athens, Georgia

Take a look at Site Welder.......many templates to choose from with paypal links, etc. www.sitewelder.com

Itpurs Loc: Carson City, NV

I'm no web designer, but after a year of trying different things I found that Weebly was the easiest for me. It still takes a bit of time but their help is great. It's free for the basic program, my only cost was a domain name. I have not finished it yet, but do have a weekly photo posted and some travel shots. Give it a look. Also I do use Facebook and Picasa, but have not yet put those links on the site. Leave me a comment. Would love to hear from my fellow hoggers.

Www:itpursphotography.net.

Ambrose Loc: North America

Hire a web-designer or did you create your own?
I just created my own with WordPress. I find it an easy learning curve and they've just release a new template specifically for photo sites (http://en.wordpress.com/portfolios/).

Pitfalls? None that I can find as of yet

How much time do you spend maintaining it?
This depends what you want to get out of it. If you don't mind a simple set up like mine, it only takes a minute to load a picture, a few minutes to load a new page.

Do you also use one of the on-line services?
I use 500px, Fotoblur (a 500px copy), and pBase, but only in a minor fashion. With these groups, you are confined to their template.

Other notes on Wordpress:

You can start using the Wordpress domain, then when you're ready, claim your own domain for only $18 a year, which is nice.

Most of all, looking forward, I know I can customize my site any way I like without being locked into a specific template.

Here's my site (though do note, I don't have much here yet) ;) http://ambrosephoto.wordpress.com/

Lorendn Loc: Jackson, WY

Ambrose -

Good thoughts. On thing nice about Zenfolio, SmugMug, Picassa and Flickr is that they integrate completely with the Lightroom "Publish" feature so that anything you process into a chosen collection in Lightroom is automatically synchronized with the website. This cuts maintenance to a minimum.

Stanley Fleming Loc: Maine/Florida

Just a comment to clarify a point regarding templates - not sure about other software but Weebly, while providing templates, does not require that you use them and if you do use one to get started you are not 'locked in' - you can change to a different template at any time and/or modify it in any way you want.

Pepsiman Loc: New York City

OK! How do I do it? Tony

dupe4050 Loc: Seattle, WA

www.luisgbunuel.com Your gallery is great and opens up another topic on ""how to". I know in the past there was discussion on this, but nothing as good as what your are creating.

dupe4050 Loc: Seattle, WA

Your gallery is great and opens up another topic on ""how to". I know in the past there was discussion on this, but nothing as good as what your are creating.

travelwp Loc: New Jersey

I created my own webpages with Frontpage 2003:
http://travelwp.com

Pitfalls: lots of time spent in the beginning learning how to do it, but after you make it work, changes are easy.

If you only have one webpage, maintenance is directly related to how many changes you make.

Daryl New Loc: Wellington,New Zealand

We use
http://webs.com,for photonews,our sports site and http://tripod.com for our personal site.if you go to http://gnufoto.tripod.com ,there is a link to photonews.Can't put link up as am accused of too much self promotion...Don't understand as it's a hobby site and promoting nothing except local news and sports....

bunuweld Loc: Arizona

Thanks for the nice praise. Before I answer, note the correction to my site that I misstated and that Stanley brought to my attention: The site is:
luisgbunuel.com

I wanted to make a site where the small images could be easily found and enlarged with one click to a better visible size. As I barely knew html language, I chose SiteGrinder from Medialabs. It offers the tools to do what I did without having to resort to html. Here is a link:

http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder3/introvideo.php
I am not promoting it. It is fairly expensive. Manageable at my relatively superficial level, but it took me some labor to get the site in reasonable shape. One could probably create much more complex sites with the program if willing to spend the time and energy. SiteGrinder can be attache to Adobe Photoshop and used in conjunction with it.

As you saw, my site is dedicated to fractals, one of my activities, although many of the images are manipulated beyond fractal boundaries and I even have one where one of my fractals is merged with one of my collages from various painters of the Northern Renaissance. Doing this only as hobby, my site is purely for display, so it didn't branch into listing or pricing.

Take 5 Cinema Loc: Canoe BC

GREAT TOPIC Being far too busy with other things, and heartily agreeing that getting a pro is the best option for the tech part and perhaps the creative artsy part as well, is there anyone out there in UHH land who is damn good at it? As others have said, the time invested is a lot to learn from scratch, when an experienced junkie has learned all the pitfalls and corrected them and has developed a great feel or good sense.

For me, I am into movie world, so sound, video, drama and action are part of the requirements. I need a motion, moving site that grips you and holds you - which then sells you. Static doesn't work for me.

Anyone know anyone who may know someone who knows someone - or something like that.?

Cheers,
Take 5

jsteven53 Loc: Northern Ohio

My nephew actually offers web sites for $5 through fiverr running wordpress. You just get the hosting from http://www.them2dudes.com/hosting and contact him at http://fiverr.com/t2dmike.

For more advanced sites you can email him for quotes, he does good work at fair prices. mikemcglug@gmail.com, tell him uncle steve referred you!

He teaches you how to use them too.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Try www.smugmug.com for creating your own website easily and hosting it there without any other software or expenses required. They handle all your e-commerce needs, you have galleries, password protected areas, and a big variety of web page styles to choose from. Just add your text, photos, and prices you want to sell prints for, and you're up and running. When your customers buy prints from a gallery, SmugMug will even process the order, take credit cards so you don't have to set up merchant accounts for yourself, and send the order out for printing from your full resolution files that are stored on their sever, and deliver to the customer.

I don't know how much easier and professional looking you could get than that. And it's only about $150 a year.

I used to do websites for business, industry, and a couple small municipal cities. It's NOT child's play unless you know several software packages inside and out and have enormous creativity - both graphically and marketing wise, and understand e-commerce, credit card processors, etc.

lorvey Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska

I used GoDaddy.com for the registration and Zenfolio to set up my website. I agree with others that have recommended Zenfolio for hosting and setup. I don't recall how long it took to set it up, but it was very user-friendly and flexible. I changed my mind several times on the organization and the changes were very simple. My website address is listed below.