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Author Topic: Website Questions  (Read 28615 times)

PeterAit

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #20 on: March 11, 2014, 01:29:08 pm »

Bwah hah hah! I hope you don;t go down the same road I did - my own domain name, an attractive web site, lots of lovely images, and so on. Not a single sale in over 2 years. The web does not work as we might wish, putting good stuff out there is not enough. Why? Because 1 billion other people have also put good stuff out there.

This has been true for my photography as well as for my medical consulting business. My web sites are a place to send people for more information, not a way to attract new customers.

I am taking a new tack, and that is to focus on local promotion Still in the early stages, but I have hopes. If I can meet a potential customer and shake him by the lapels ... er, convince him to buy ... I expect it will work out better than expecting some photo collector in San Francisco or Bangor to buy a print based on my web site.
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uintaangler

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #21 on: March 11, 2014, 02:05:26 pm »

Peter,
What you say makes sense - can you expand upon what you mean when you say "local promotion" ?
Bob
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Justan

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #22 on: March 11, 2014, 04:18:23 pm »

Bwah hah hah! I hope you don;t go down the same road I did - my own domain name, an attractive web site, lots of lovely images, and so on. Not a single sale in over 2 years. The web does not work as we might wish, putting good stuff out there is not enough. Why? Because 1 billion other people have also put good stuff out there.

This has been true for my photography as well as for my medical consulting business. My web sites are a place to send people for more information, not a way to attract new customers.

I am taking a new tack, and that is to focus on local promotion Still in the early stages, but I have hopes. If I can meet a potential customer and shake him by the lapels ... er, convince him to buy ... I expect it will work out better than expecting some photo collector in San Francisco or Bangor to buy a print based on my web site.

Your comments parallel my experiences. Most of my promotions are done at local shows where I’ll see up to many thousand prospective buyers and up to 20 confirmed buyers per day. The web site is good for follow up and also helps to get into shows. Many times after 1-3 shows someone will say, i saw your work at ... show(s) and want to buy. I think this is probably broadly true for most newer members of the art sales arena. Those who have been around for a long number of years may have a greater opportunity to generate sales from a web site because their prospective customers have seen the work first hand at some points before.

There are so many artists’ web sites that they become akin to grains of sand along a long beach.

uintaangler

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #23 on: March 11, 2014, 04:22:33 pm »

Justan,
Who did your website?
I like it - clean, simple, effective
Thanks,
Bob
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Colorado David

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #24 on: March 12, 2014, 12:37:10 am »

Brad Crandall did the website for him.  You can find him at http://www.pugetsoundwebdesign.com

Craig Lamson

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #25 on: March 12, 2014, 09:35:07 am »

Just updated mine, a very simple Dreamweaver flexible grid using Juicebox Pro for the galleries. Finally got rid of the flash and went html5

www.craiglamson.com
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Justan

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #26 on: March 12, 2014, 01:09:27 pm »

Justan,
Who did your website?
I like it - clean, simple, effective
Thanks,
Bob

I’ll pass your complement back to Brad. He does good work and is very reasonable. He did the original build modeled on another web site i found, and i add to it periodically, using an older edition of Dreamweaver. I plan to add some additional features in the near future but am happy with it overall.

jjj

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #27 on: March 12, 2014, 03:41:31 pm »

Don't forget that a website needs to work well on tablets/phones too.
For example, if you use Flash, then it needs to degrade to HTML5 gracefully.

I'm not happy with how the front page of mine works on the phone, past that it's fine. But every alternative I've looked at has had a drawback of some kind.  :-\
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Justinr

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #28 on: March 13, 2014, 05:34:00 am »

Bwah hah hah! I hope you don;t go down the same road I did - my own domain name, an attractive web site, lots of lovely images, and so on. Not a single sale in over 2 years. The web does not work as we might wish, putting good stuff out there is not enough. Why? Because 1 billion other people have also put good stuff out there.

This has been true for my photography as well as for my medical consulting business. My web sites are a place to send people for more information, not a way to attract new customers.

I am taking a new tack, and that is to focus on local promotion Still in the early stages, but I have hopes. If I can meet a potential customer and shake him by the lapels ... er, convince him to buy ... I expect it will work out better than expecting some photo collector in San Francisco or Bangor to buy a print based on my web site.

Well said and it needs saying more often, a website is not an immediate sale maker, in fact I often doubt its usefulness to many businesses other than to reassure customers that they not totally behind the times by having one. The number I see that started off full of promise and have not been updated for two or three years lies as testament to this but there is such a vast industry trying to sell you the concept of the indispensability of one that we all to some extent become brainwashed by it.

Websites will work when you are a dedicated online trader and have the time and interest in maintaining it and focusing your efforts on web sales, and are dealing in products that sell on the web. They are also essential to many as online brochures but to others they are a just another shiny big spanner that they are expected to carry in the marketing toolbox, nice to look at but rarely useful.

If you are going to have a website then you are going to have to drive traffic to it. SEO is often mentioned but you are competing for attention with people who have teams dedicated to ensuring they appear at the top of lists rather than you, whatever it is you are trying to sell. I have a regular blog which I take time to bring to peoples attention, it's the most frequently visited page, which is the good news, the bad news is that 70 - 80% of visitors spend less than 30 seconds viewing any of the pages on the site and I defy anybody hear to improve much upon that number, say 50% spending more than half a minute on their site.

I'd say to the OP, get a site together by all means to ensure that you are taken seriously, but do not expect it to perform any sort of magic.

Peter, I wish you all the best with your alternative approach and I think you are quite right to try it.

As for Facebook.....  Don't even start me!

Oh, and my blog is  - www.inkplusimages.com/wp   :)
« Last Edit: March 13, 2014, 05:40:17 am by Justinr »
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Mike Sellers

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #29 on: March 13, 2014, 10:23:32 am »

Can someone take a look at the website of Henry Domke and tell me how I can get one like it?
Mike
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john beardsworth

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #30 on: March 13, 2014, 01:43:29 pm »

Can someone take a look at the website of Henry Domke and tell me how I can get one like it?
Mike

It seems to be a Stockbox - www.stockboxphoto.com. Generally with these services you upload images to their site's management pages and then output your own web site using a template/options they suppply.

One little point is that Stockbox seems to be stripping the colour profile and not tagging the images with sRGB. So the colours are probably off.

John
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Phil Indeblanc

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #31 on: March 14, 2014, 04:27:06 pm »

Has anyone considered SITEGRINDER?

You design the site in Photoshop and it somehow is supposed to make it into a website.

I purchased it, and its been sitting with no use, as I need to upgrade to v3.  But I'm hesitant to invest the time into it. I think Richard Smith's response was rather helpful and the route I would resommend.

I have 2 sites and have art directed 5 others. I usually get a few templates to pick from and customize them for clients. I work with 1 or 2 specific programmers to get it done. I know WordPress is very popular now. Maybe I should learn that before SiteGrander?  I had learned to use Flash some time back, but with mobile OS's, its not that friendly for iPhone users.
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Mike Sellers

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #32 on: March 14, 2014, 08:37:03 pm »

I contacted Henry Domke and yes they used StockBox but it is highly customized.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #33 on: March 15, 2014, 04:07:51 am »

Mike,

Do bear in mind what I wrote about the colours. A lot of online services resize the JPEG images and strip the colour profile, and while you might like Domke's site, the pictures' colours are off. I didn't look at the metadata in the JPEGs, but I'd bet copyright and other info had also been stripped.

John
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jjj

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #34 on: March 15, 2014, 09:08:21 am »

Has anyone considered SITEGRINDER?

You design the site in Photoshop and it somehow is supposed to make it into a website.
I recall looking at it a few years back but times move on and not sure it is worth bothering with.

Plus.....

Media Lab Support Status
Tom Summerall February 13, 2013 • Media Lab News and Extras / Announcements

I apologize for the state of our support right now.  We are acutely aware that robust tech support is a major priority for a software company and have traditionally provided some of the best support in the industry.  Unfortunately such support for every question we receive is not possible at the moment given our current staffing situation.

Media Lab sales have been hit hard in the past year and, as a result, we have been unable to maintain our excellent tech support staff.  Tech support for SiteGrinder is especially challenging because our support engineers must be expert in not only SiteGrinder, but also Photoshop, HTML, CSS, javascript, jquery, AJAX, PHP, Web server configuration, and more. As you can imagine, this skill-set makes our support engineers extremely valuable in the jobs marketplace.  In addition many tech support questions involve lengthy complex investigations into things like novel hosting incompatibilities, and cannot be answered quickly.  The result of this situation is that we literally have more support questions than we can answer.

Customers who have urgent problems can pay as little as $15 to enter the paid support priority queue.  The response time for this queue is usually same day on weekdays during normal US business hours.

This situation is not one we chose, it is one we have been forced into.  Media Lab will continue to provide the best support we are able to, including fixing bugs, but we do ask your patience given the constraints placed on us right now.


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Niels_Patrick

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #35 on: March 24, 2014, 05:03:33 am »

I did mine with a cargo collective template.
http://cargocollective.com/
Very basic but finally a lot of customizing work with html, css, ...
Optimizing it for the ipad / iphone was horrible.
Still jet not finished ...

Check it out:

www.geisselbrecht.biz

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Justinr

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #36 on: March 26, 2014, 04:41:47 am »

I did mine with a cargo collective template.
http://cargocollective.com/
Very basic but finally a lot of customizing work with html, css, ...
Optimizing it for the ipad / iphone was horrible.
Still jet not finished ...

Check it out:

www.geisselbrecht.biz



Just loved the video work there, especially the use of slow motion. The photos were a tad slow in loading though.
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jjj

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #37 on: March 26, 2014, 09:47:39 am »

I did mine with a cargo collective template.
http://cargocollective.com/
Very basic but finally a lot of customizing work with html, css, ...
Optimizing it for the ipad / iphone was horrible.
That's the tricky bit, making a site work well on desktop and mobile platforms.
Looks very good on desktop, similar in some ways to what I'm aiming at for next iteration of my site. Site loads very quickly, my only niggle would be the [nicely edited] splash video could be higher quality for viewing on higher res screens, but then there's the trade off in speed. Is there an option for different res output for larger monitors?
Had a look at it on iPad and the template doesn't seem to do dynamic resizing to fit photos properly on screen which is a shame. But as you say, you not finished yet.
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Phil Indeblanc

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #38 on: March 27, 2014, 02:06:54 pm »

Cool video. I couldn't scroll the photos as there is no indication where, so I can only see 2 or third is cut off on FireFox.  Might be a good idea to check that, and Chrome, besides iE.

I hear you Jeremy, about SG. wish I never purchased SG v2 in the first place :-(
« Last Edit: March 27, 2014, 02:08:41 pm by Phil Indeblanc »
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Justinr

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Re: Website Questions
« Reply #39 on: April 01, 2014, 11:29:09 am »

I've added some thoughts on websites as a sales tool and the internet in general here - http://inkplusimages.com/wp/
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