Website development - DIY or Outsourced?

[Erik Anderson]

I'm budgeting for next year and looking at tasks I currently do myself, but could outsource. Web designing is one of them. I could go at it myself from scratch (again), buy a template for anything from $50-$500, pay an up and coming 'starving designer' a few hundred +, or hire a pro firm outright (so far that's $$$$+).

I'm curious as to how everything else has done their site. Did you just start working on it yourself? Did you hire someone? Did you go to one of the hundreds of template sites and start there? Did you bite the bullet and get a pro shop to do it? Did you see a noticable increase in traffic and/or business after you got your 'pro' site up?

[Todd Corzett]

I do mine myself... it's simple for now, but took some time. I designed it from the ground-up (no templates here!), but took inspiration from other sites I'd seen. If/when I decide to implement a searchable database I will go out to someone else for that part. I could do it myself (which would be fun), but would rather pay for a turn-key solution that I could use. I'd never really want a site/database where I'd have to go to someone else to make upgrades/changes though... I like keeping the control.

As for increases in traffic... I can honestly say (and have the stats to prove it) that my traffic has increased with a site that was designed to incorporate aspects that search engines like. Has it resulted in any sales... no, but at least now the people who see my sites aren’t just searching for my name! If via a shop, or by yourself... it's a good idea to put some thought into how it will be seen by the search engines.

-Todd...

[Dennis Murray]

A mix of both for me.

Technically, my website is based on Joomla! (http://joomla.org) which is a content management system.

I've had to develop my own templates and do all of the config and set up myself.

[John Jovic]

I've taken the same approach as Todd, done my own very simple site, and when I need to go to a databse I'll have someone else create it for me but in such a way that I can manage it myself. I'll be going down that path very soon, for another site I'm building.

I have no need to be found by search engines, my site is purely an online folio. I can email an editor or potential customer a link, I don't expect any new work from my site. By the way, I spent about a month (after hours) rebuilding my site when I lost a drive on one of my computers. Back to square one...

Your situation might be different. If you expect your site to get you new business then you might be better off getting a pro to do it (though you can do it yourself) to ensure that you get seen by search engines.

JJ

[Daniel Buck]

mine is done by myself, if you keep it nice and simple (which I think is best for gallery type websites anyway!) it's pretty easy.

[Paul Hansen]

I've gone down the Joomla path as well. I find the most important part, and the hardest part, of a website is putting up new content, and so try to keep that as easy as possible.

cheers

[Jeff Boerio]

I'm budgeting for next year and looking at tasks I currently do myself, but could outsource. Web designing is one of them. I could go at it myself from scratch (again), buy a template for anything from $50-$500, pay an up and coming 'starving designer' a few hundred +, or hire a pro firm outright (so far that's $$$$+).

I'm curious as to how everything else has done their site. Did you just start working on it yourself? Did you hire someone? Did you go to one of the hundreds of template sites and start there? Did you bite the bullet and get a pro shop to do it? Did you see a noticable increase in traffic and/or business after you got your 'pro' site up?

I got started with web design in the early '90s before most knew what the "internet" was. You might look to a web hosting company to take care of all your needs. The company I use offers all sorts of features with their monthly package, which is about $100/year. Content management software (CMS), web galleries, databases, shopping carts, mailing lists, mail servers, etc.

If you take the time to design your "template" (or pay someone to do it), then using the CMS features should be pretty simple.

- Jeff

[Austin Langley]

I did my website not too long ago. I started from scratch with no prior web design knowledge. At least you have something already up. I plan to do several more of my own personal sites soon, including some experimentation with flash. I had looked at templates, but didn't like the fact that somebody else can have the exact same thing as me. I prefer a more unique approach. I started by finding sites I liked, then took the parts I wanted and incorporated them into my own. I think it helped having my graphic design background. I also have this book called "Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Creating High-Impact web pages" by Colin Smith (isbn 0-07-225588-9). It was about 40 bucks when I purchased it. That made designing my own site very easy.

I never had a site before. Within the first few days I had roughly 400 hits, but it's tapered off to about 15-25 unique hits per day. I think my self promotion has been the major reason behind my activity.

[Jacob Leveton]

I had mine designed by a friend of mine and traded services (i shot some photos of her daughter for her). But I started redoing the code myself to update some of the features, and got really frustrated because i didn't like the organization of the code (i'm very particular about organization!).

So I started a redesign myself, then got frustrated again.

Now i'm looking to go down the simpleviewer path, at least for the time being.

[Erik Anderson]

I did my website not too long ago. I started from scratch with no prior web design knowledge. At least you have something already up. I plan to do several more of my own personal sites soon, including some experimentation with flash. I had looked at templates, but didn't like the fact that somebody else can have the exact same thing as me. I prefer a more unique approach. I started by finding sites I liked, then took the parts I wanted and incorporated them into my own. I think it helped having my graphic design background. I also have this book called "Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Creating High-Impact web pages" by Colin Smith (isbn 0-07-225588-9). It was about 40 bucks when I purchased it. That made designing my own site very easy.

I never had a site before. Within the first few days I had roughly 400 hits, but it's tapered off to about 15-25 unique hits per day. I think my self promotion has been the major reason behind my activity.

I skimmed your site and like the layout. I might just steal...er.....REFERENCE IT! ;) I'll check that book out as well as ponying up the dough for D8. I got a quote back from the professional design company and they want $3K for the site design and coding. Way out of my budget and makes spending $500 on books and software (not including time) look cheap. I'm hesistant to use any of the Craigslist people, so I might just have my winter project set aside for me already.

[Erik Anderson]

I got started with web design in the early '90s before most knew what the "internet" was. You might look to a web hosting company to take care of all your needs. The company I use offers all sorts of features with their monthly package, which is about $100/year. Content management software (CMS), web galleries, databases, shopping carts, mailing lists, mail servers, etc.

If you take the time to design your "template" (or pay someone to do it), then using the CMS features should be pretty simple.

- Jeff

I'll poke around on my providers page to see what they offer. I do know that they have software (rudimentary) that I can use to build a website, but haven't looked at much else. I'll check out what's available before I buy the software and books. I'd like to know how to do it but just don't have the time to keeping doing the one man show and be responsible for everything.

[Jeremy Olson]

Have you checked out Smugmug? http://www.smugmug.com/pro/ There pro level accounts let you do an amazing amount of customization of web sites.


Jeremy

[Erik Anderson]

Have you checked out Smugmug? http://www.smugmug.com/pro/ There pro level accounts let you do an amazing amount of customization of web sites.

Jeremy

I am familar with them, yes. I think they would be a great choice if I wasn't already paying for webspace and have gallery creation software with paypal coding. I'm looking more to hand off the creation/revamp of my webpage to someone more knowledgable than myself.

[Justin Libano]

Now i'm looking to go down the simpleviewer path, at least for the time being.


simple viewer is great, but somewhat tricky (and i'm seeing it almost everywhere now). It looks great when inbedded into an existing page.

[Mike Ditz]

Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should do it. If your clients are'people' and lower budget race teams, etc. they aren't really looking at your website they are looking to see if you got a good shot of them.
If you are going for more commercial work with magazines, corporations, well financed race teams and ad or design agencies, it would be a good thing to get a designer involved. They are looking at your work and how you present it. Templates might be something to stay away from in a creative field...

MD

[Austin Langley]

Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should do it. If your clients are'people' and lower budget race teams, etc. they aren't really looking at your website they are looking to see if you got a good shot of them.
If you are going for more commercial work with magazines, corporations, well financed race teams and ad or design agencies, it would be a good thing to get a designer involved. They are looking at your work and how you present it. Templates might be something to stay away from in a creative field...

MD

To a certain extent I agree, but if you have a website that looks like a 4yr old made it, not many will give you the credit as a professional photographer. I'm not saying you need to be super creative and have a completely unique site, but a site with good navigation that's clutter free would be ideal.

[Austin Langley]

I skimmed your site and like the layout. I might just steal...er.....REFERENCE IT! ;) I'll check that book out as well as ponying up the dough for D8. I got a quote back from the professional design company and they want $3K for the site design and coding. Way out of my budget and makes spending $500 on books and software (not including time) look cheap. I'm hesistant to use any of the Craigslist people, so I might just have my winter project set aside for me already.
That books helps tons! But there were some parts I had to make up because the book doesn't specifically cover galleries and such, but the principles are there so if you get creative you can come up with something pretty cool. If you get stuck or need help along the way, let me know and hopefully I can help you out.

[Todd Spoth]

i think a clean website that's easily navigable is key. i did mine by my lonesome and incorporated it based on my business card. the top graphic is actually the back to my business card so people know that it's me. i also incorporated an easily updated gallery as well.

if you dont have the design/coding know how and have the cash flow. check out livebooks.

here's mine: www.toddspoth.com

[Erik Anderson]

Just a quick update. The pro's want about $3K to design a website and frankly, that's so far out of my ballpark it isn't funny. Due to time contraints, I probably won't get around to a redesign until late fall, so I hope to have some time to do a bit of reading and research into the subject.

I like the layout of my site but think it can be improved with some changes, With respect to that, I like what Todd (Corzett) has done with his site. Keeping it text based (rather than graphic) for searchability is important to me.

As for my clients, they have been attendees at events that I've covered. I'm shooting more commercial products, so I need to keep that in mind, but at the same time I'd love to be more involved with coverage of events or cars on a feature basis with print and web mags.

[Steve Demmitt]

this is something I would let the pros handle
only reason I made my site to begin with was because I used to be a web/graphic designer and I knew what I wanted more than anyone else
I figured why not save some money and do it myself
but if I didn't have the knowledge or design ideas, I would have gone elsewhere

[Mason Trullinger]

Erik,

If I were in your shoes, I'd take a good hard look at the customization features of Photo Shelter. It is a template system that can be as complex or as simple as you'd like it to be plus the backend interface is one of the nicest I've dealt with in my 12 years of web design/development.

About 3 years ago I designed my photography site by hand and in a static design (each page was it's own html page). This required some serious time whenever I wanted to update things so I spent the last year looking at various web-based photo management systems to integrate into my site. I liked some of the stuff other photographers had done with Photo Shelter so I went that route. Now I've got my entire archive hooked up to my portfolio site but the portfolio portion is still static. Eventually I'd like to get it all database driven but for now it works for me.

Take a look at my site and also how the archive is integrated into the look and feel and also how you can go back and forth seamlessly. It took a little bit to figure out all the Photo Shelter CSS tags (and I'm not 100% sure how they designed that stuff either) but you can really do some incredible stuff with it. I might be able to design something for you within your budget depending on what type of features you have in mind.

The biggest benefit for me with Photo Shelter is that all of my content in my archive and about 80% of my portfolio can be licensed and downloaded on the spot. Plus everything is available for prints and Paypal is hooked up to it all to handle payment processing.

Send me a comment from my website if you'd like any more info.

Mason Trullinger
http://www.masontrullinger.com

[Antonio Donatelli]

Though some like doing it themselves, I've always found that hiring a good designer and letting them also handle the programming makes for a great site. They do it all the time, so they know how to optimize the site for speed, compaitibility, etc. They're also along the lines of who you may be pitching with your images, so it helps to have someone who knows and studies design and function to make a site to showcase your good work in the best possible way.

I know many of you have financial reasons to want to do it yourself, and if photography is your hobby you may want to just look at some of the available pre-made flash website templates out there you can purchase cheaply. Or do it yourself if you must. Just remember, it's time you won't be spending perfecting your craft.