Gitchigumi Loc: Wake Forest, NC

Not sure how you managed to have a bad experience with SmugMug. They are dedicated to photographers. Their services are excellent and the support is outstanding. I get an immediate response from a "hero" at SmugMug when I have a question or need help. I'd recommend them to anyone. Many professionals use SmugMug. Check it out for yourself... 👍😎👍

magpix Loc: St. Michaels, MD

While I know many photographers use Squarespace, I found that getting started was not easy. So instead I tried Adobe Portfolio, which is FREE with the Creative Cloud subscription. It is extremely easy to use, and the templates are designed to showcase photography. Easy and free (with CC subscription). Can't beat it.

rburnsrlt

Hi, I've tried most of the ways to create a website. The first was with 1&1 in the late 90's using their builder. Once I got serious I started looking around, took a couple $10 classes on Udemy, also looked at some free ones. Finally looked on YouTube, search for wordpress photography and you'll find many with full instruction. Wordpress is one of the best out there and you can't beat the price, $0. It also gives you the best blogging that I know of...give it another try with YouTube as your coach and I think you'll be happy. I currently use Divi with my Wordpress sites and find I can make my site just the way I want. I've even built sites for others, mostly racers, and it keeps me up to date. So far I've built 37. I'm 72 years old and no computer geek, just wanted a certain look for my site and was able to get it.

For building your own website, check out Site Origin. It's a free Wordpress builder with lots of videos. Here's a link to a video about one of their solutions, from there you can find more, https://siteorigin.com/one-page-websites-page-builder/?autoplay=1 , copy and paste from "https to ?autoplaty=1" and you can decide. No matter which way you go, I've found more free stuff for wordpress on YouTube than any other builder. Good Luck

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Definitely! Your chart shows photo-hosting sites, which are more expensive than plain web hosting for someone building their own site. Unfortunately, the web hosting prices rise dramatically over time.

dannac Loc: 60 miles SW of New Orleans

Surprised by the customer service part ... there was live chat during the week, and emails were answered over the weekend.
This was in 2014.

philden Loc: Victor, NY

Check out Zenfolio. Not that expensive, sell your pics, good customer support. Good luck

whitewolfowner

If you find one, let me know. Been searching myself. There's a lot out there but useless tutorials on how to use them. If you have the adobe cloud; it includes two programs that are for that and some support ones to go along. Dreamweaver is the big one that uses html code but you practically need a degree to use it. Muse is simpler to use and more limited but for both the tutorials are old so they don't match the present ones and they all assume you know web building software from somewhere else. It's ridiculous, especially when using ones you pay for.

Bozsik Loc: Orangevale, California

WIX.com has all the tools you need. Many template you can configure yourself. I just have the basic plan, but you can pay for more features. My site is www.naturescamera.com. It has a blog feature(which I use), as well as many other things I don't use.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

I was looking at the Adobe Portfolio system last week. I was impressed. A surprise was that I get it with the $10 per month CC plan.

bkyser Loc: Fly over country in Indiana

Don't give up on wordpress. Download a plugin called "tinymce advanced" (I think that's it. it's really close, anyway)
You can find plenty of youtube videos on it. It actually makes the wordpress into a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) website editor.

I'm probably the least computer savvy person there is, but I found that when doing the tinymce plugin, everything just came together. I only have one issue, and that's with my gallery showing everything the same size. I've downloaded several gallery plugins, and I think I'm getting the galleries mixed and matched up and messing it all up. Going to be working on deleting the whole gallery section, and starting over.

Not that mine is anything special, but it certainly was easy. (for a super novice)

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

Is there any way to sell photos via Adobe Portfolio? Does it track visitors?

Billy Bob

SMUGMUG .com
Like you 5 years ago I was looks to build a web site. I ONE FOR $500. and $200. and $50. a month and got F... Then meet a web site builder by email her price was $1,000 she seen I couldn't go it then told me about smugmug best $40. a year I ever spent. I can display my work, sell, and just talk about ?. And they put you on search engines to help you get google's first page (me www.bbnpb.com and the first domains name I used www.snapshots2010.com what you need to start with.
1.domain name from godaddy keep it short and sweet. Like bbnpb.com is BillyBobNoveltyPHOTOIibooth.com I have 7 domain names go to www.bbnpb.com Domain names and KEY words help you in search's and what your all about.
2.Smugmug.com
3. Put your domain name on every FREE search engine you can find on google.
All this cost me about $55. and time doing it.
It worked for me just make it a fun thing.

Billy Bob

O I find out the way to get your site to come up like mine dose is the www. in front of your domain name. Don't think this works over night it takes months.

Billy Bob

Your web hosting is smugmug. Also your email should be info@ your domain.
And try to get .com

mikenolan Loc: Lincoln Nebraska

I've been slowly building my site (http://mynebraskakitchen.com) with WordPress, but writing custom pages with WordPress can get complicated, especially if you want features not generally available or aren't satisfied with the standard templates. (It also helps if you have good artistic skills and sense, which I admit I do not, I tell people if it wasn't for click-drag I couldn't draw a straight line!)

I think Wordpress-hosted sites are more cut-and-dried because they limit what templates and plug-ins you can use. You can put up a blog quickly, select a few options and, voila, you've got a blog site. Of course it'll look similar structurally to 1000 other blog sites.

I expect to spend more time upgrading my site after I retire next month. I hope to spend a lot more time out taking photos as well.