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Website Problems

androiduk

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Here's the situation. I am a photographer (mostly architecture & street scenes) and I sell between 200 and 300 prints a year online, plus whatever I can sell in cafes and shows. I'm happy with the quantity of my online sales but most of the sales are through a giant corporate website (art.com) and the royalties I get are very low (15%). I have my own website (andrewfare.com) but sales and visits are pathetically low. I built and host my site through Yahoo's geocities and I'm thinking of moving to a new host & website builder, either low cost or free. Any suggestions as to hosts or if I should just stay where I am and re-do my site would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to be brutally honest.
 
Wow, your images are stunning. Do you take all the photos yourself and create the posters/montages?

I suspect if you got more traffic, you'd sell even more, but earning web traffic is much easier said than done. If art.com is selling your art and only giving you 15% of the revenue that is robbery. The proportions should be reversed, in my opinion, but again: that is the power of web traffic.

Geocities is a pretty bad solution for any type of hosting. You could easily purchase a proper web host with FTP access, databases, etc. with any number of web hosting companies for less than $100 per year. 1and1.com is a company I've frequently used for hosting because they are cheap and offer a good back-end control panel, but unfortunately they are US-based, if that matters to you. The have hosting plans ranging from $5 to $20/month.

If you want to process sales on your site, though, you'll obviously need to pay for a more extensive site. Credit card processing, for example, requires a merchant account, SSL certificate and more care regarding security, and usually requires a fairly serious investment. Handling payments through a third party like PayPal is a lot easier, but they also take a cut and it would still require integration work you'd probably want to hire a developer to do if your web skills don't go much beyond HTML. Once built, a stand-alone site would then require help to earn traffic: one option might be to pay for google ads for specific keywords ("toronto photos", etc.) but again, that requires some up-front investment.

If you're not up for all that, I guess you're stuck with pre-made sites that handle all the dirty work for you and take a cut out of your potential profits. Surely there must be something better out there than the art.com deal though, yikes. Your art deserves better than that.
 
You photos are great, really great, but your website hardly has any text. I must admit I know little of website design, but I think if there was more text on your site, it could have more traffic since the search engines like Google would actually be able to find it.

For example, search "mississauga" and "photo" in Google and the Mississauga section of my site will probably be somewhere on the first page of the results. I suspect that most of the traffic on my site is from Google search, because the Mississauga section is the only one that shows up on Google, and the only one that gets a decent amount of traffic. So despite the lackluster photos, a few people still visit my site since it is more text-based and therefore shows up in the search engines.

I have also given titles and descriptions to some of my photos. I don't spend too much time on this sort of thing because I am not a photographer and I don't sell prints anyways. And I don't like having too much text on my site. But for a photographer like yourself, this might be something you should look into.
 
Your website visits are low because your site is really basic and poorly optimized for keywords.
 
I'm just on my way out but quickly read your question and I'll give you a quick reply:

SmugMug.com. They're about $140 per year, come with a ready built infrastructure for displaying and selling your photos, and you determine how much profit you make.

I'll add more info when I get back. :)
 
Thanks for your replies folks. It looks like I'm going to have to buckle down and put my student hat on to create a more professional looking site.

You don't need to change much really since it is a nice looking site. But without much text, people are not going to find it unless you refer them to it.

At the very least, the title of the main page of your website should be more than just "home." The titles of all the pages should have your name at least. The main title could be "Andrew Fare - Home" or "Andrew Fare Photography - Home" for example.

The titles of the other pages should be changed too. If I am not mistaken, this would be very simple to fix.
 

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