Bali Expat Forum - Bali Travel Forum

[milan]

Your inputs have been enjoyable to read.

[Tony]

I'm here... I read the forum daily, but only chime in if I have something of value to contribute or some idiotic posting to refute.

Thanks for asking, Milan.

And Selamat Hari Raya Galungan to all..

Tony

[Bert Vierstra]

What a nice site you have there, Tony.

I hope to find my white balance one day as you seem to have Where do you buy those colors , that paint ?

Sitewelder ( http://www.sitewelder.com/ ) seems to attract a lot of good photographers.

I am busy developing a CMS myself, so I looked with interest. Unfortunately they make quite some mistakes in the html department, but that's just nitpicking, because it all looks smooth.

Not cheap though...

But I guess they also function as sort of a portal, and that will be of some added value...

[Bert Vierstra]

Oh this one:

http://www.trevorgoldsmith.com/

Nice too... Birds flying High

Promoted on, but not hosted by Sitewelder...

[Tony]

Aloha Bert,

I'm sitting here at the computer doing a massive edit when I get the email alert that there is a response to this thread. Thanks for the kind words. I live & work in a colorful place... usually I am trying to dial down the color saturation a bit rather than enhance it.

I've been using the Sitewelder templates for about 6 years now and am very happy with it. It's easy to use, very flexible, navigation is quite intuitive. In the last year they have added code to make it even more search engine friendly. As far as price... compared to the alternatives such as LiveBooks, it's quite reasonable. Sitewelder portfolios seem to load faster than LiveBooks too... a very good thing considering the short attention span of most art buyers these days.

Customer & tech service at SiteWelder has been incredible. I live in a time zone 6 hours behind the zone where they have their offices. I've called them with questions at 11:00pm-12:00am their time and someone almost always answers the phone, often Allan, the developer, himself.

[milan]

Hi Tony, not at all, you're welcome.

Yes, I agree with Bert's comments as I love your photography. They look neat, sharp, proportional with colours that are striking and quite a range.
And as chiming in selectively on this Forum, I hope you chime in much more frequently as I do enjoy very much reading your posts/writings taken from your perspectives either from Bali itself or from Hawaii, the place you're from. It's a breath of fresh air, I find.

And Bert, what's CMS?

[Bert Vierstra]

Content Management System.

Its a program to edit content on your website without knowing something about html.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

[charlie]

oh i dream of having my own photography site .... but it's really quite expensive to do in Aust - well atleast the people i've had quotes from anyways!!

if anyone can recommend someone either in aust or bali that isn't too expensive i'd be eternally grateful!

[Tony]

I don't know what you call "expensive" nor do I know what your goals would be in having your own photo site, charlie. Your images at your Flickr site are wonderful and that platform shows your work nicely. There are some inherent problems in the Flickr platform, however, such as piracy.

In my case, my website is often the first contact that potential art buyers have to my work. My goal is not so much to "share" my images with the world. My site is my digital portfolio used to attract assignments or calls to see my physical "book" (portfolio). In that regard, cost is way down on the priority list. After consultations with professional agents, reps, art buyers and photographers consultants, the consistent message on displaying work via a website has been:
1) keep it clean and simple
2) focus on the images and forget all the fancy flash gimmicks (flash pages are not search engine friendly)
3) display the images as large as possible
4) make it fast loading & easy to navigate

Sitewelder's service is one of the least expensive user managed template systems available. The initial costs to set up a site, register a domain, etc. is roughly $350US. This gives you storage of up to (if I remember correctly) 250 images in a user managed library (these can be changed, deleleted, replaced an infinite number of times), unlimted gallery pages, informational pages (bio, contact info, et.), direct email contact from the site, etc. After the set up, the cost is $35US/month to maintain along with the cost of re-registering the domain every three years.

The most popular alternative, LiveBooks, has packages starting at $800US for a very basic site, to $3200US for and "unlimited" package. LiveBooks then has a $90/year maintenance charge for each of these packages.

All of these services have international users so being in Oz or Bali is not an issue.

I recall in a series of emails we shared several months ago that you were interested in going pro and attempting to make a living from your work. Here's a couple of links to blogs hosted by a former big-shot photo editor for a major US magazine, a well know photographer's marketing consultant and a freelance art buyer/producer. All of these blogs have lots of info about how to get your foot in the door with magazine art buyers, ad agencies, what these people like and don't like about photographer's websites, direct mail & email promos, printed portfolios, etc. If you're interested in stepping up to a career in commercial or editorial photography, I highly recommend reading the info that these three individuals share in their blogs. It has helped me immensely in making contacts, developing confidence and attracting new clients.

http://aphotoeditor.com

http://www.burnsautoparts.com/blog/

http://artproducer.blogspot.com

[charlie]

Hi Tony

That is defintiely a lot cheaper than the couple of thousand plus a bit i have been quoted here!!!

1) keep it clean and simple
2) focus on the images and forget all the fancy flash gimmicks (flash pages are not search engine friendly)
3) display the images as large as possible
4) make it fast loading & easy to navigate

Is exactly what I am looking for in a website!!! Flickr has been good in the sense my images are "out there" and i have have sold a few through flickr for books and cd covers. But as you say, I don;t really want to share anymore, i need a folio ...

I have come leaps and bounds since we last emailed and am getting alot more paid jobs and i'm getting my name out there ...

I will definitely read those blogs!! thanks for all the info Tony!!

[Tony]

Cool. charlie. Check them out... the service is great, the cost affordable, the content, look & design (many options for page layout & color) is easily managed by the user.

Allow me to correct the previous comment about flash pages. Flash pages can be made to be search engine friendly according to a web designer interviewed in today's blog entry at http://aphotoeditor.com. And.... flash can be an interesting and enticing way to make your entry page really stand out provided it loads in a reasonable amount of time. The bottom line is, however, that we are photographers, not graphic designers. My opinion (an opinion that's been reinforced through discussions with other art buyers) is that using lot's of trick design on your website may in some way distract from the images displayed. And... should the potential art buyer reviewing your site not be especially fond of the design you've chosen, you may already have one strike against you that has nothing to do with the quality or vision presented in the actual images. Best to keep it simple, I think... let the work speak for itself.

Congratulations of your success in moving into the realm of the professional. Best of luck with your continued success.

My apologies to forum readers for the decidedly non-Bali turn this thread has taken.

[Bert Vierstra]

Well, Bali brought us together, didn' t

You may want to have your webmaster look at this, Tony:


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=si ... gle+Search

There are lots of not found pages, which are not handled correctly, and this can affect your rankings.

And this:

http://www.tonynovak-clifford.com/pages/3/Blog/Blog/

Is a very spammy page, and will do you no good. (look inside)

Do you get a lot of relevant traffic from search engines?

[Tony]

In reality, Bert, at my level of the game, search engines are kind of like the yellow page telephone directories. What I mean is that the potential new art-buyers I seek I seek are less likely to find me thru using a Google search or flipping through the telephone directory than they are by responding to email & direct mail campaigns, creative source book ads like Workbook & Black Book or or other professional online photographer directories like pdnonline.com or editorialphoto.com

That said, rankings are still important in the overall marketing scheme. Google ranking has been up & down but much improved after I subscribed to their data tracking service. I do get quite a bit of traffic directed from Google. How much of it is relative is hard to say. Search engines like search.live bring in a greater number of referrals than Google.

Thanks for that link. I'll pass it along to the folks at Sitewelder.

[SG]

To be honest, I pulled back after a couple of conversations which I felt were going in a direction that I wasn't comfortable with. I have lots of time for most folks on here but there were a couple that I felt a moral gulf with so I deleted the bookmark.

But here I am again.....

[milan]

Great, SG, to hear you back. After all, your knowledge is so much more rich, interesting though not everyone agrees but that's what makes this Forum as long as it stays within the boundary of respect which obviously have been disregard in many instances. But I hope you too will refuse to be intimidated/put off by the people you find uncomfortable to exchange opinion with. As long as the perspectives you represent are authentic and based on personal experiences or it's according to how you perceive, why withdraw? Each one of us see things differently, express them in various ways be it elaborate or succinct, basic or scholarly, it shouldn't matter as we are not here to be judged but just exhanging and enriching if possible. That's my motto. So, welcome back.