Okay, I'll try to keep it short. After lots of stalling I'm at a point where I want and need to get a lot of things going online. I will most likely have a blog/website combination (although not positive about that yet) and use a vendor to upload images for purchase. My to do list as I see it is: create my logo, register a domain name....and after that I'm overwhelmed. I know the group and lots of others use Flickr. But is that just for sharing? Is that in addition to a vendor that hosts/prints/ships images? Many use wordpress for blogs, but they have their domain name in the url. Do I need to find a server for my domain name and then wordpress links to it? Would I use flickr for blog photos and the vendor just for customers? I've read so much over the last months that it's all swimming in my head now. Everything has a fee, which is ok, but I certainly don't want to double my efforts when I don't need to. Thanks in advance for any advice or thoughts. Ann

Ann, I am just starting out myself and recently (thanks to another member here) was turned on to Zenfolio.com. For $100/yr you can get more options that you may ever need to support your online sharing and sales. You can see mine as an example at bozarthphotographic.zenfolio.com.

Hope this helps!

Ted

You're tackling a very long project all at once. You need to break it down into stages.

Identity

Online Portfolio

Sales Channel

Content Management

Those are your big blocks.

Your identity is your logo, registration as a sole-prop / llc / etc, filing your business permits, tax id #, etc. Do you have a basic idea of your business plan? It can be on a napkin but it's good to make sure you have some goals. You can skate by on not having all of what it takes to be a business but you'll have to make up for it at some time.

For your online portfolio is can be a part of your sales site or it can be it's own entity. These days it's much more recommended from a starting standpoint to find a host like smugmug, zenfolio, livebooks, etc to jump into something that will both allow you to upload and possibly channel sales.

Keeping them separate requires a lot of work and upkeep. If you go down this path you're probably going to have some custom or off the shelf flash gallery you send pictures to and some shopping cart system you'll have to adopt.

Flickr is a way to showcase some work in a social sense. It's a medium for you to grow in and find potential customers because of the weight of the whole site but it's not your main site.

Content management, blogs, are good to have but you don't have to dive in with your own host and custom installs. If you're not used to the medium then there is no sense wasting a lot of time up front. There are plenty of sites like Tumblr, Posterous, that offer a very simple way to publish a "blog" without the overhead. If you feel like moving your content later because you've grown you can export your data or siphon it off to a custom Wordpress/etc site.

At some point you'll need to think about marketing and newsletters are an easy way to do DRIP marketing. Mailchimp allows for free newsletters up to a fairly large audience.

Food for thought but most people I work with who have this much cut out in front of them and very little experience in many of the technologies is to go at it slow and work on building a consistent rhythm to it all. If you can sustain through the off the shelf tools then you can easily grow from there. Work smarter, not harder, and all that.

Fun stuff, you're about to learn a lot!

Ann,

One of the easiest things to do is go ahead and get your domain name (before someone else grabs it) I use www.regalweb.net for domain name registration AND my web hosting.

It's very dependable, and you can add features as you NEED them and grow you business. Domain name registration is only $9.95 per year, and includes email, and forwarding (which means it will automatically forward your customers to ANY website you choose, like a Smugmug, or Flickr, etc)

Check it out and just let me know if you need any help with it. I own about 8 domains that I use for a variety of purposes.

ILP has a website forum with a lot of good advice.

]Thanks everyone for the great info - and Andy, wow! I'll be digging through them all to see what I see. Also, for anyone interested, there's a website where you can put out a bid for graphic design work, specifying what you need and then designers offer ideas and you choose your favorite. They've done a lot of photographer's logos and I've seen bids range from $75 to $250.

Hi Andy - a few thoughts and questions...

I will sign up (as in pay) for Flickr and finally upload photos - am starting to see that it really doesn't make sense not to.

Since you broke all of that down so simply, can you help me make better sense of part of it please!?! I'm thinking that regardless of whatever I do, I should get the domain name so it doesn't disappear, even if I don't do anything with it right away. Here's where I get foggy - ideally I'd like to have a web address on my business card for people to look at. Using a domain name (my name) makes the most sense - but if I use Tumblr (for instance), I wouldn't be able to use that, right? And if I used Tumblr (or another) would I then just have a link to my smugmug (for instance) page? In the whole website vs blog vein, I'm leaning towards just having a blog, which will also have pricing info and galleries, with my domain name. Is this too much custom / technology to be starting off with? That's my problem, having everything nicely boxed, tied with a neat little bow.

My immediate issue is printing up info for up to 700 people to view pics from an event Even if it was just a link directly to smugmug (or whatever), I'd really like to have "my website" info on that card for future possibilities that might come out of this event.

Thanks again for taking the time with this - I really appreciate it!
Ann