Photographers Websites/Hosts

[Vuurtoren]

There are so many Photographers' Hosting servers out there.  One such Host has attracted my attention as a second website, and I was wondering what your experiences are either of past or present web hosting companies.

http://www.photoshelter.com/ Anybody familiar with this one?

[AndrewKulin]

I use them - what do you want to know?

I took a look at your site and I like what I saw.

[Vuurtoren]

Hi Andrew, just peeked at yours too.  Liked the grandmother in Dordogne.  I think the landscapes are stunning - not my cup of tea, or is it cafe starbucks there in the states, but they are stunning, do you get many buyers from your site?

Ok what attracted me to photoshelter was there dedication to the photographer, they seem to understand this market and they seem to offer you plenty of scope with SEO, I have studied it through Lynda.com but also in general they appear, how shall we say, to exercise a more professional approach to the photographers needs than what I am used to at this moment. Not to mention there talk about sales, though that kind of offer doe snot attract me since I have no illusions about the rather misleading market pitch about selling from the website.  Anyway, what is your overall experience in regard to the points that I have jsut mentioned, I got invitations to webinaars and registered only to discover that  I could not join the session for whatever reason, but I was not going to try out the 1 dollar offer until I have learned more thoroughly about their own ratings in the google page war so to speak.  Some website servers/hosts and even personal web builders lack "reputable" rankings in google simply because of the nature of their service, though often it is the cheaper ones here.  But on this front I am relatively new, I actually hate marketing myself, bit yep, I really need to unfortunately.

Regards
Chris.  Oh, glad you liked my website, out of curiosity, which gallery caught your eye?

[AndrewKulin]

Chris:

I shall try to answer your questions sequentially.

I do not sell anything from my site.  I may set that up at some point in the future, but I too am under no illusions that anyone would wish to purchase any photographs on-line.  If I was doing shows or trying to market myself in other ways then I would probably get the selling feature set-up/turned on but at this point (for myself), it is not worth the effort.  Eventually when I retire I'd like to try this route but that is still a few years off.

Regarding SEO, they do go to lengths explaining how it works and setting up their template pages to make it fairly simple to implement.  Does it work?  I do not know really - I do get hits and such but can not tell if it is SEO related or just dumb luck.  SEO is just one small part of a marketing approach and should not be relied on 100%.

I have never tried to log in to their webinars but it is probably some sort of incompatibility somewhere in your computer set-up (could be anything - no Flash, missing video CODECs, something caused by your anti-virus software, etc.)

Galleries that caught my eye - Tone Poet (reminds me of the style another Toronto area fellow does a lot - John R), a Thing Seen and some of the B&W people shots.

[Vuurtoren]

Hi Andrew, thanks for that.  Good to hear somebody elses experiences.  By the way just as a matter of interest, are you logged into google analytics?  Or are you relying on photoshelters statistics for observing hits?  I only ask because you said that you do not know if it is luck.  that led me to assume that you do not have google analytics - because then you get the same power as the big boys in viewing who exactly is looking at your delightful images - right down to what computer they are using, resolution, java, browser.  Where they are, which town, and many many other ways to understand if your webpages are doing their job of presenting themselves to the public at large when they type in search words and phrases.

regards
Chris