Photobiz template/hosting service?

[olgabe]

Hi all,
Coming full circle - I got started with for profit photography about a year ago, and now - a dozen weddings and numerous portrait sessions later, I'm ready to upgrade my website.

I am currently using a weebly.com template for my showcase gallery, with client gallery/ordering site thru zenfolio. Weebly is not SEO friendly, zenfolio is even less so - if it was not for that, I'd use the zenfolio front page for portfolio gallery. I'm looking for something that looks professional (in my view, photobiz templates look great) and can be well SEO optimized (I'd have to outsource that - don't have enough time or interest to learn about it with my pretty demanding full time job), and has a blog feature that allows good size image posting for weeding previews/teaser images.

Anyone has any experience with photobiz or similar sites? Is is possible to get them to rank well in Google/Bing?

Thank you!
Olga

[Niresangwa]

i use photobiz.i like them.

if you use the search function here on the forums, you will find others do too.

[olgabe]

Lovely portfolio, template looks great.. you really make that wide-angle lens work hard
So how is the SEO working? Are search engines finding you easily or are you mostly on word of mouth?

[ReenaG]

on the photobiz templates they have spots for you to put in your SEO information. I can find myself pretty easily (the terms I used-keywords) so I would say it works well.

They do have a 30 day trial (you do have to pay upfront but they will refund if you don't like it).

another one you can look at is Portfoliositez.com they are very similar and the start up cost is not as much!

[candleman]

i love photobiz... cant get easier IMHO
90% of my work is referrals from facebook... the other 10% is from searches or google ads

[Jim Bryant]

For my commercial sites I use photoshelter and exposuremanager.com. Mostly my wife designs my overall website in CS and dreamweaver.

[ShantDotMe]

From my experice as a web designer developer, & from what I have learned/experienced there is no "service" that will be as SEO friendly as your own domain name / hosting.

One thing for sure, if you want SEO site, drop all-flash based website! a small flash animation(slideshow) is OK, but check if that animation can be done in another way, like jQuery.

[Nekrose]

Originally Posted by ShantDotMe

From my experice as a web designer developer, & from what I have learned/experienced there is no "service" that will be as SEO friendly as your own domain name / hosting.

One thing for sure, if you want SEO site, drop all-flash based website! a small flash animation(slideshow) is OK, but check if that animation can be done in another way, like jQuery.

Actually, Photobiz has SEO Optimization for the flash portion. You can also have a mirror html site.

It is pretty kick ass.

[ShantDotMe]

Originally Posted by Nekrose

Actually, Photobiz has SEO Optimization for the flash portion. You can also have a mirror html site.

It is pretty kick ass.

I haven't tried Photobiz, can you post a print-screen of the SEO page of flash portion? I would like to see how much it can be costomized.

There are two options to SEO a Flash site.-
1.- using keywords/description in the head of HTML, which although helps is not very effective anymore.
2.- Redirect Search engines to non-flash sites so they can read the content you have in the flash site, this will give far better results but it is "illegal" to do so.

Keep in mind that starting early 2010 how fast your site loads is effecting your page rank too & since absolute majority of all-flash based sites (specially template based all-flash site) do load far slower than the HTML based site, then they are not SEO-ed.

Lets not forget that.-
- not all browsers have flash plugin installed.
- apple's i-series (iPod, iPhone, iPad) do not support FLASH at all, that's millions of "high-end" users
- not all mobile browsers do support Flash.

[funcrunch]

Originally Posted by olgabe

I am currently using a weebly.com template for my showcase gallery, with client gallery/ordering site thru zenfolio. Weebly is not SEO friendly, zenfolio is even less so

Just out of curiosity, how is Zenfolio not SEO-friendly? I've been using them for a few months and they do have SEO-labeled fields to put in keywords, descriptions, etc., but I haven't been hosting with them long enough to judge the search effectiveness. My main site is hosted on my own domain, and I generate a Google sitemap daily on that site to help with SEO.