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Author Topic: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website  (Read 43921 times)

MarkM

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #40 on: October 16, 2013, 02:35:45 pm »

Yes.
Original images are 2000x1400px in size and still look sharp on my phone.  :) There's sometimes a few secs pause with first page, but rarely after that, unless you resize browser.

When I view in Safari, I am seeing a Flash website at that link. This, of course, is a different set of solutions and problems. For instance if Flash is disabled (which is increasingly common) you just get a blank white page. Same is true if javascript is disabled. In general, you want these things to fail a little more gracefully. The minimum is a notice that Flash and javascript is required. A blank white page is not a good solution. Also, it's worth looking at Google's cache to see what it sees at your site. The cached page of your front page is an XML error.

Also I don't see the site scaling images to match my browser unless I enter the site with a large window. If I go to the link with a small window and decide to resize after the image loads, the images never grow to match my window. See the screen shot. Both Safari and Firefox show this behavior.

It seems you are serving an HTML gallery to the phone. I got the server to send the html gallery to my desktop to see if you were in fact scaling images on the back end in the html gallery. You're not. They look good on the phone because the screen is tiny. The server is sending 1200 pixel images (at least the one I saw) which then get scaled larger to match the screen. Worse, the 140 pixel thumbnails on the front page are getting stretched to about 500 pixels on my screen with obvious consequences.

None of this is to say the site is bad, just that you haven't solved the problem I was talking about.
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jjj

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #41 on: October 16, 2013, 04:13:04 pm »

That's odd, whenever I tested site before when changing page size it worked fine, though if you make site fullscreen, it resizes to bigger images, which is probably the only resizing people are going to do whilst actively viewing. Though I do make some web pages smaller to improve readability of text [like on LuLa's old design and current forum design], as fluid width sites with no size restrictions make for difficult reading of text.
I have to say, I hate the front page element of my site when it's does the HTML thang on the phone and is partly why I'm looking for a better way of doing my site.
 
Thinking about it, with high res screens you get on phones now, they are liable to be quite large images. I know the images I do for portfolios on my phone/tablet are probably the same size as  my desktop monitor at 1:1.

Well if you disable flash, then you're going to get a lot of blank pages on many photographer's sites. Flash is a really useful design tool, but because of Job's irrational hatred of it it been sidelined in favour of HTML despite the fact that HTML is way inferior to Flash for some task/reasons so a huge step backwards for the web killing it off. Though because Flash allowed people to sideline Apple's gated money pit that meant it would have been shut out anyway. Safari runs Flash really, really badly, but then it's a crap browser anyway so that's not surprising.

In fact what I'm looking for is a site with functionality something like yours. I recall looking at it a while back and admiring the [nice big] photos.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2013, 04:23:38 pm by jjj »
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MarkM

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #42 on: October 16, 2013, 05:24:12 pm »

In fact what I'm looking for is a site with functionality something like yours. I recall looking at it a while back and admiring the [nice big] photos.

I appreciate that. Fair warning: I also don't solve the problem of resizing on the fly. My 'solution' is to send much larger images than most people will need and then limit the max size they can scale. This means each page is quite a bit heavier than it should be in an ideal world. I try to ease the pain a bit by preloading images and using a CDN for static content, but it's still a compromise.

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jjj

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #43 on: October 16, 2013, 07:19:28 pm »

It's usually a case of choosing your compromises. :-/
There's a CMS at back of my website with large pics but which when a page asks for smaller images, it will resize and most importantly sharpen to suit to suit and then caches them, so after viewing on different sized pages then subsequent delivery is theoretically faster. But then again I have 100Mbs broadband and it doesn't seem any faster than dial up did.
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Justinr

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #44 on: October 17, 2013, 06:14:54 am »

That's odd, whenever I tested site before when changing page size it worked fine, though if you make site fullscreen, it resizes to bigger images, which is probably the only resizing people are going to do whilst actively viewing. Though I do make some web pages smaller to improve readability of text [like on LuLa's old design and current forum design], as fluid width sites with no size restrictions make for difficult reading of text.
I have to say, I hate the front page element of my site when it's does the HTML thang on the phone and is partly why I'm looking for a better way of doing my site.
 
Thinking about it, with high res screens you get on phones now, they are liable to be quite large images. I know the images I do for portfolios on my phone/tablet are probably the same size as  my desktop monitor at 1:1.

Well if you disable flash, then you're going to get a lot of blank pages on many photographer's sites. Flash is a really useful design tool, but because of Job's irrational hatred of it it been sidelined in favour of HTML despite the fact that HTML is way inferior to Flash for some task/reasons so a huge step backwards for the web killing it off. Though because Flash allowed people to sideline Apple's gated money pit that meant it would have been shut out anyway. Safari runs Flash really, really badly, but then it's a crap browser anyway so that's not surprising.

In fact what I'm looking for is a site with functionality something like yours. I recall looking at it a while back and admiring the [nice big] photos.

I'm not wanting to get involved in another poo throwing contest but I'd like to suggest that the main problem with flash was that search engines were blind to any content within it. Another objection was that it could take a long time to download but that is probably of less importance nowdays with the faster broadband speeds.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2013, 06:18:34 am by Justinr »
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jjj

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #45 on: October 17, 2013, 02:06:27 pm »

I'm not wanting to get involved in another poo throwing contest but I'd like to suggest that the main problem with flash was that search engines were blind to any content within it. Another objection was that it could take a long time to download but that is probably of less importance nowdays with the faster broadband speeds.
Flash was made searchable many years back, but people still went on about that being a problem with Flash along with other inaccurate myths. Such as being slow to download in fact.

The problem with faster broadband speeds being made more common is that website designers it would seem, don't bother to try and be lean anymore. So despite my having a silly fast connection, websites can still be painfully slow loading and things seem no faster than when I first moved from dial up to 512k.
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Lightsmith

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #46 on: December 20, 2013, 11:42:20 am »

I use http://smugmug.com for image hosting (the power user version with a custom domain link).
If you mainly need galleries, this is easier than anything wordpress based.
But if you want it more blog like, then this is probably not the right way of doing it.

cheers
afx

(If you like it, you might want to use this discount code:  otXC5kHuzE0bw).

Smugmug forces you to use a domain registered with Godaddy. If you have an existing domain with another register you cannot use Smugmug.
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HSakols

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #47 on: December 23, 2013, 11:14:13 am »

I'd encourage you to build your own from scratch.  I built my site using Softpress Freeway Pro which does not require knowledge of html (however, later you can make html changes if you like).  This way you will get a your own signature look.  I use the photo portfolios from LR, however, there are some real slick ones out there to choose.  Living in an area that has pretty lame DSL, I prefer to post html galleries as opposed to flash. 
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Graham Clark

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #48 on: December 31, 2013, 03:21:42 pm »

I'd recommend bluehost.
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jjj

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #49 on: February 14, 2014, 07:33:35 am »

Living in an area that has pretty lame DSL, I prefer to post html galleries as opposed to flash. 
HTML is not per se faster than Flash. That is myth. How a site is constructed is the key to speed.
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afx

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #50 on: February 14, 2014, 09:11:17 am »

Smugmug forces you to use a domain registered with Godaddy. If you have an existing domain with another register you cannot use Smugmug.
Nonsense.
Godaddy is not involved in what I use.

cheers
afx

LesPalenik

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #51 on: February 15, 2014, 07:02:37 am »

There is a new kid in town - Symbiostock. It's a wordpress theme, the basic version is free, and you can link and be linked to other photographers. You'll run your own website and can place it on Bluehost or any other server.

Originally developed for stock photographers, it is quite flexible, and you can use it also for search and display of your individual images, group images by categories, and even organize them into collections. The theme has also provision for blogging. Recently, I posted a related article about Symbiostock on my blogsite - www.advantica.wordpress.com

There is a wealth of information about Symbiostock on their main websites at www.symbiostock.info and http://www.symbiostock.org

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moreau1991

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Re: What are the best Web Hosting /blogger tools for photogrpahy website
« Reply #52 on: May 12, 2020, 03:58:30 pm »

A lot of people that I know have decided to use free web hosting and It was a big mistake. Their website are not good, they lag a lot and they lack the security. After I saw their experience with free hosting I decided to look for something else. I looked online and I found this article on web hosting https://mangomattermedia.com/web-hosting-india/. They explain how everything works and there is a list of best web hosting services. I have chosen Hostinger because it was the best overall and it was really cheap. They offer great security and performance and it was really an easy choice.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2020, 05:54:13 am by moreau1991 »
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