When you hear the term 'high-res' thrown about with such abandon when it comes to images for web use, have you ever stopped to think just how big or how high quality and image meant for the web needs to be?
Art Storefronts: a complete website solution for photographers?
We all know that any photographer worth her or his salt has a website that's handsome, easy to navigate, easy to maintain and customise, and offers potential customers a feel for a photographer's style. As a consequence, there are plenty of companies that provide just these sorts of websites for photographers. They're easy to personalise, they show off photos beautifully, and they provide photographers with a web-presence that doesn't demand too much thought, time, or energy. And to help photographers make more money from their photos, some of them include print and product fulfilment, too. Now there's a new one on the scene that is aiming to take on the likes of SmugMug and Zenfolio, giving photographers print and product ordering facilities in addition to giving them a website that shows off their images and gives them a professional front. This one is called Art Storefronts.
Art Storefronts offers all of the portfolio website features that you would expect: a library of customisable responsive designs, easy social sharing functionality, and access to analytics.
What Art Storefronts believes sets it apart from other sites offering portfolio hosting and product sales is the interactive buying experience it offers your customers. Visitors can 'test drive' a wide variety of different options with dynamic live previews, and complete their purchase with a simple checkout process.
If you don't want Art Storefronts to fulfil your orders, you can take control of that yourself. Should you prefer Art Storefronts to handle print orders, you set the markup on your products and receive 100% of it.
Price-wise, you can expect to pay $19 per month for a basic package; $29 per month for the middle-of-the-road option; or $49 per month for the all-singing, all-dancing variety. It's certainly worth checking out if you're interested in selling prints direct your website.
Professional-looking web portfolios from Picmoo
If you're not looking to host your own photo website, there are plenty of photo portfolio building and hosting sites there to do it for it you. Breaking into the market might not necessarily be easy but Vlad Mereuta, a former BBC tech lead, thinks that his new platform, Picmoo, is different enough to turn some heads. For a start, there are no multi-option pricing plans. Sign up for Picmoo and you pay a flat fee of £6.99/€6.99/$9.99 a month (when billed annually; £8.75 a month when paying month-to-month) for everything that Picmoo offers, and that's quite a bit.
Picmoo provides unlimited pages, galleries, and blogs; if you subscribe to an annual subscription, a custom domain is thrown in, too.
At the moment, subscribers can choose from five mobile-friendly templates for their galleries, with another seven designs in the pipeline. All of these templates can be customised from colour, to typeface, to margins to get the look that you want. When you've settled on that, arranging your content is a drag-and-drop affair.
Images can be uploaded directly from Adobe's Lightroom using Picmoo's plugin and there's integration with the likes of Flickr, 500px, and Twitter for easy cross-posting. If you're looking to migrate from a different platform, Picmoo has import tools to help you out.
I think that Picmoo offers anyone who's trying to show off their images and blog a bit on the side a very reasonable option. If you're looking to start or switch, there's a free 15 day trial to see if it's for you.