I am so excited to announce the debut of my new website through
showitfast.com! It was a very hard decision for me choosing a company to host my business. I felt like there were so many to choose from. But after doing a bit of research, I narrowed it down to my top 3 hosts. Showit, zenfolio and SmugMug. Even though I finally decided on Showit the other 2 had great features. Even features that Showit didn't have. I will give some reasons as to why I finally chose showit and what i found while using my trials at zenfolio and smugmug.
Zenfolio is a very nice site that is very easy to build right out of the box. This was good for me because I don't know the 1st thing about code, HTML and whatever other technical thingy they use to build websites. I was able to set up my home page using pre-made templates and backgrounds, upload photos into galleries and customize the colors on my page and upload my own logo, favicon etc in a few hours. It was a very professional looking site that I ended up with. Huge plus with these guys was the option to let people order prints through your site. A client can go right into their gallery (either password protected or public), click their favorites and if you have enabled buying option, order prints directly through the site at your own prices. By the way, in order to set your own product prices you need to subscribe to the higher priced subscriptions. They use a bunch of great labs. Don't want to use their lab options? You can set up self fulfilled orders through a lab of your choose. They have easy uploading. Digital download enable/disable function. This way if you want to offer the digital downloads to your clients you can just give them a password to unlock them. This was a great feature for me since I either use CDs or sendbigfiles.com to deliver files to my clients. They have a great slide show and also have music that you can add for free and if you want more music options they offer a music package for purchase. They are also pretty affordable with the top level being only $250 a year!
Down sides to zenfolio for me were: They were not as customizable as I wanted. Yes it was a very professional looking site that would make my photos shine. But I am of the
Jasmine Star school of thinking. Those of you who don't know her, she is an amazing international wedding photographer. She is one of my mentors even though she doesn't know it; ) She believes that people will hire you if you put yourself out there. I don't mean just put your "art" out there. I mean put your personality out there WITH your work. Think about it. I have great photos on my site of babies, pregnant mommies etc. Joe Schmoe photography has great photos on his site as well and he might live just down the road from me. They might even be somewhat the same shooting style as mine. What will set me apart from him?? My personality!! Even if we both had sites that reflected both of our personalities, some people will be more attracted to his personality than to mine and vice versa. Jasmine talks about attracting and repelling in one of her courses I attended. She would rather put herself and her personality out there and run the risk for repelling someone. Why? Because if they didn't like her online presence, they probably wont like her in person. Therefore, they would not be a good fit for her as a client. That's OK. She just saved herself some precious time. This person might have contacted her via email and set up an appointment to meet with her only to find that she wasn't a good personality fit for them. They both wasted maybe 3 hours of their time finding out something that they could have realized had she put her personality on her site. I think this philosophy may pertain more to wedding photography than portrait photography because you are working with a couple on one of the biggest days of their lives. You want a good fit. But then again, I wouldn't want to work with someone with my kids that wouldn't be a good fit either. I think the better the fit, the higher chances you will be more relaxed in front of the camera which in turn makes for better pictures. Just my opinion. Now I am not Jasmine Star, even though I would like to be in her shoes: ) I will take any wedding or shoot that comes my way right now. But I still feel like I will be saving myself some time attracting and repelling the right clientele for my business. So, I kind of went off on a tangent! Back on track. Zenfolio was not customizable enough for me to show my personality the way I wanted to. They didn't offer monthly pricing, so that would have been $250 upfront for me. Also I was not sure I wanted to commit to a full year with one company.
On to smugmug. Smugmug is very similar to zenfolio. It offers client galleries, pick your favorites and ordering prints right through their site as well as setting your own prices (top 2 price levels). It is also very customizable! Looks like pretty much what ever you want can be created. Although don't quote me on that. They offer a monthly price too at reasonable rates.
What I didn't like was it was not as easy to navigate as zenfolio. I was quite confused by their edit page. Although confusing me is not hard to do on a morning when my kids have kept me up most of the nite; ) If you want anything more than the provided templates and backgrounds you need to know code etc. I would have to rely on someone else to do what I wanted for my site. Which if you know me, I want things done yesterday! : )
So finally there is showit. I loved how customizable it is. Basically you are only limited by your imagination. You don't need to use code. The editing designer is downloaded onto your computer and it has a setup similar to photoshop and uses layers. Since I use photoshop and most people that have a photography business I'm assuming use it as well, the learning curve wasn't that bad. Although right off the bat it looked pretty confusing. But after watching a few of their video tutorials I was up and running. The ton of video tutorials were very helpful! They start with the basics and expand into the advanced like mouse overs, making a +site and using facebook commenting on your page. They give you the option of a blank page to create your site from scratch or a bunch of already made websites put together by their awesome designers. These already put together websites are fully customizable. Bacically keep what you like and change the rest. You can also hire one of the designers to make a custom site for you. When making your own or using one of the predesigned sites you can drag and drop your pictures, change the layout, add subtract pages etc. They have a scroll bar at the bottom of the page that has all you files (pictures, video's, etc.) and also showit files, which include a bunch of useful widgets like facebook, gallery, tickers, borders, backgrounds, music, video etc. At the top of the page they have a preview button. This lets you preview your page as it would appear on the web, scrolling galleries, working links and all. You can download the program for free to use and design your site. You don't pay a thing unless you subscribe to hosting so take however long getting to know the program at no cost! I loved the facebook integration and the +sites. +sites are sites that are made off of my main site. I have already made one of my clients a +site for their newborn. They absolutely love it!! On the bottom of their +site I have a link back to my site. Think of the marketing possibilities of that when they share their newborns custom site w family and friends. These people are only 1 click away from the site that created it, mine! Another little note, did you know that 57% of brides make their own wedding sites? Light bulb! Why not do one for them and create the marketing buzz for yourself rather than for someone else!!! :D Showit offer monthly pricing. (Good thing since I could not afford the yearly lump as of right now. Maybe next year; )
So even though I am totally sold on showit. There were some things I did not like. First being that unless you create a gallery with thumbnails, your clients can't have a private gallery on your showit site like they can on smugmug and zenfolio. They can not pick their faves. They can not order prints right though the site to a lab. But don't despair, showit is partnered with smugmug! Although you have to pay for them both separately, which I don't get. If I am already paying showit an arm and a leg, you would think that they would provide the kit as well as the caboodle in the package!! Oh well. They do offer
PASS as a way to allow your clients to share their photos on facebook while still providing you credit. Pass offers digital downloads and storage as well for a fee of $29 per event. I think they have other pricing options but they are hard to find on the PASS site. I have experienced a few glitches along the way when uploading photos onto showit. Some of the uploaded photos put on my page mysteriously disappeared. I had to re upload them a few times. I think I figured it out -- maybe it had to do with the fact I had that photo on a zip drive. Not sure. Also I made a page to display some of the things I enjoy when I'm not holding a camera. I created on this page a mouse roll over effect so that when you scrolled the mouse over the pictures, the picture would disappear and the words beneath describing the picture would show up. Neat huh? Well the mouse over stuff all looked and worked great in my preview, but, when I published my page, only one of the photos on the page displayed. I have no clue what happened but I have a support ticket in to try and fix.
In conclusion, for someone like myself, who relies on social media and word of mouth, and is not interested in doing fliers and tangible marketing, who would prefer having a fully customizable site without having to learn code, showit was a good fit. Showit provides me with powerful marketing tools through social media that were not available, as far as I could see, through the other hosts. I was willing to give up the option for selling prints through my site for the social marketing boost. My rationale was, if they cant find me, or haven't heard about me, I won't be selling many prints anyways, right?
; )
I absolutely love my new website so far and highly recommend trying showit. I think they will be worth the money.
here is a link to my new site!
If anyone has any questions about my experience with showit please feel free to ask in the comments below. I would be happy to help.
