Changing websites. Every couple of years I like to completely refresh my business profile in an effort to keep my brand fresh looking and interesting. When I started out with photography I initially built myself a really awful basic html website (can be seen below) and I quickly realised this was no good and started looking elsewhere.
There are a number of companies out there that offer a number of solutions. Two of my favourite companies at the time were Livebooks and Big Folio. Big Folio’s sites look very smooth, load quickly, have good SEO and their customer service is really excellent. If something is broken, they generally fix said problem within hours (even at weekends). However, when I started out I was only a photography student and I didn’t want to spend that much money.
So that’s where Livebooks came into play. At the time they were offering an education discount of $90 a year for a website. How awesome. Granted I would have loved and would still like one of their custom websites but back in those days custom sites cost in excess of $6000. Eek! So I went with their student solution. My portfolio at the time was pretty awful but I had a professional looking website. Woohoo! Sadly I don’t have any screenshots of this site anymore to share.
After graduating from my photographic studies I retained a Livebooks membership for a couple years but it eventually ran out. Boo! So I looked for another solution. This is when I came back to Big Folio. At the time I really loved the look of Flash websites and I compared solutions from several companies including again Livebooks, Big Folio and Creative Motion Design. (Liv incidentally has a CMD website and she loves it). At the time of looking the Livebooks sites looked too generic for me, I couldn’t find a CMD design I particularly like but I loved Big Folio’s solutions. There were two particular templates, the Artist Series and Santiam Pass that I liked. The Artist Series site at the time was too expensive for my budget so I went with the Santiam Pass template.
In a word loved it, but, there were limitations in how much text could be placed on the screen. At first this wasn’t an issue but I eventually got sick of it and upgraded to the Artist Series. I had a really beautiful website with cute graphics, lots of space and lots of customisation, loved it.
This of course took place roughly two years ago and recently I got to the point where I wanted a change. First of all I wanted to move away from Flash, I wanted a site with more backend control and as part of this I wanted to make a lot of changes to my templates. So I bought Big Folio’s Rubix template.
In a word, awesome, absolutely love it. It looks just as good as my Artist Series site, there are more customisation options and providing I pull my finger out it should be much better for SEO. Another thing to mention is as part of the price Big Folio enacted something called a Live Swap. This meant all of my data was swapped to the new template without any need to reupload images, redo my blog or anything. When I’ve changed my site before I’ve had to do this and it’s a massive pain and I really don’t have time for it.
So below are some screenshots for my Rubix site and how it’s looking so far. No doubt I’ll make a few more changes but I wanted to keep my website simple. I’m also looking into another Big Folio called ProPx which allows you to create custom galleries which you can share with clients, galleries you can put on Facebook/Google+ and much much more. I’ve been wanting to change the shopping methods on my site and when time allows (probably in a month or so) I’ll look into it more.
Right, so that’a the latest from me, back to editing wedding photos!
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