The Best Photography Website Templates: Introducing a New Series

***UPDATE: Below I say that I ultimately chose Photobiz as my solution. I did for my wedding site. But I’ve recently converted my personal site (as well as this site) to the new Photocrati WordPress themes. You can check out the themes here: Photocrati’s WordPress photography themes.

Of all the template shops I considered in my recent search for a new web template for danzerphotography.com, I ultimately chose Photobiz. Here is a screen shot of a gallery page on my site as it currently appears with thumbnails on the right:

Since I chose Photobiz, that should mean I think it’s the best choice out there, right? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Photobiz, like all template-style solutions has it’s own limitations. For some users, lack of flexibility, high cost, or search engine optimization challenges might mean trying another solution.

OVERVIEW

Photobiz is an all in one web solution for photographers. For a mixture of one time fees (to buy a template, set up shoppting carts etc) and monthly fees (for hosting), they handle everything: flash templates, hosting (in fact, you HAVE to host there, which is a limitation), online proofing and sales functionality so you can sell prints directly to clients, and a range of other functions and services.
Photobiz templates and the system for selecting them is at the heart of the Photobiz solution. They offer over 30 different templates, all with Flash and HTML equivalents, to choose from. One of the best features is that you’re allowed to change templates as often as you like. So if you decide you don’t like one (which I do often) you can change to another with a few mouse clicks. That’s incredibly useful. Their internal architecture ensures that all your galleries and information pages get convert seamlessly to the new theme.

OVERALL APPEARANCE

The main reason I chose Photobiz was that I liked the look of it’s websites. I wanted to try a flash site for my website this time, and Photobiz offers a ample array of beautiful flash templates and allows you to switch between them effortlessly. Their templates vary from traditional to modern, simple to decorative. You can see demos of most of their templates from their home page. Here is a screen shot of the template selection page in the back end where you can change your template with a few mouse clicks:

For each template, Photobiz offers an array of color palettes that can transform the look of your site even with the same template. They also offer the option of  setting your own colors – you can manually change the color of backgrounds, titles, text, menus, and other parts of the site.

While I have not set up the e-commerce functionality on my site yet, I should also note that the appearance of their online ordering pages seems quite elegant, simple, and user friendly. See below for full description.

The combination of beautiful templates, and the ability to not only choose between templates but customize colors within them means that, overall, I really give Photobiz high grades on appearance.

Grade: A

EASE OF USE

This is another strength of Photobiz. Their back end management system is super easy. I don’t think they could have made it any easier to add, substract, and change your website than they have. Here’s a quick look at the backend management system. When you first log in, you are taken to this page:

The round “Flash/HTML” icon on that screen shot, which takes you to all of your main site content. Here’s what you see when click that button and look at your site from the back end:

On the left hand side, you will see a list of pages and galleries. To make changes to any of those, you click on the relevant menu item. You change text using a normal text-edit box. And you upload photos with an easy-to-use, java-based upload system that looks much like the page above. You tell Photobiz which directory on you computer you want to upload photos from, and it show a list of thumbnails in that folder on your computer. You just select the ones you want, and click upload. The uploading process is relatively fast and glitch free.

Grade: A

FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN

As already noted, there is substantial flexibility to choose between templates and customize colors within templates. That is, however, as far as the flexibility goes. While Photobiz’s template system creates all kinds of advantages, one of the biggest disadvantages is that you cannot customize your site in the myriad small ways you may be used to if you’ve had your own site in the past. You can’t add extra notes and announcements to your home page, and your home page title is limited to a specific number of characters.

What this ultimately comes down to: when you set up a site with Photobiz, you won’t have direct access to any of the html, css, or other files that comprise your website. Actually, since the sites are flash-based, even if you had access to the site files, making any adjustments would be very difficult. So it’s partly a function of flash, and partly a function of the fact that Photobiz only allows you to work on your site through their provided back end management system. You don’t get FTP or other access to the server.

As a consquence, YOUR ARE LIMITIED TO WHAT EVER DESIGNS AND FUNCTIONS PHOTOBIZ HAS THOUGHT TO PROVIDE. If you are technically savvy and like the ability to tweak the appearance of your site and add little extras here and there, that won’t happen at Photobiz.

Grade: D

BLOGGING CAPABILITY

None. The other, and perhaps even more important limitation to a Photobiz site, is that there is no blogging capability. If want to maintain a blog, you would need to host it on a different server and different domain name. Give the importance of blogging today as a critical way to interact with past or potential clients, that’s a surprising omission and big, big limitation, as least as far as I’m concerned.

Grade: F

E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY

Now we move back into one of the potential strength areas for Photobiz. I haven’t set up e-commerce functionality on my site yet. It costs an extra $125, and I have not yet had a reason to pay the extra fee.

Once set up, a link appears on the top menu of your site that takes you to the main landing page for online proofing/shoppting galleries. The landing page can be set to show categories; within each category you can set up a list of galleries. Click in the galleries for thumbnails of images, and click on the thumbnails to see a particular image. Pretty straight forward.

Here’s an individual image page, where clients are able to place orders. You can see the interface on the upper right where clients can select print sizes, number of prints, etc, before adding the image to their cart.

There seems to be an upside and a down side to Photobiz’s e-commerce functionality. On the upside, their online ordering pages and seem remarkably elegant and user friendly. This seems to fit with their overall knack for design. Also on the upside, this functionality is remarkably easy to set up, and it’s great to have a beautiful selection of flash templates AND online ordering in the same place.

On the down side, while the Photobiz online ordering system takes orders for you, it DOES NOT offer order fulfillment. Once a client submits and order, Photobiz simply emails you with the order, and you must fulfill the order through your normal labs. I talked to a Photobiz representative about this, and they said they may add this functionality in the next year. They also noted that many photographers prefer it this way, because they can use their own preferred labs.

Personally, I would strongly prefer to be removed from the order fulfillment process, and have orders go directly to a lab, as happens with pro storefronts at places like Printroom or SmugMug. Individual order fulfillment can be very time consuming.

Grade: B

COST AND FEE STRUCTURE

So how much does this all cost? Clearly, Photobix is a premium template provider. They’re not selling based on price, but based on an impressive packages of services. Accordingly, Photobiz is very much on the expensive side of spectrum for photographer templates. Beyond that, I also find their fee structure a bit confusing in the sense that there are a lot of add on costs that you won’t expect if you are not paying very careful attention.

For most of their services, they charge a one time fee. For example, it costs $125 to get a flash template plus the right to switch templates as often as you like. It costs $45 to set up an HTML mirror of your flash site, $95 to set up online shopping functionality, etc.

On top of those one-time fees, you then pay a monthly that varies depending on the total number of images hosted on your site. On the low end, you can pay $15/month if you have 200 or less photos. On the high-end, it will cost you $100 if you have 12000 photos. For most photographers, the best level is someplace in the middle – say $60 for 3600 photos.

This monthly fee is the potential killer. If you are pro who shoots lots of weddings, for example, and you upload 500 images per wedding for your clients, those photos add up fast. You are going to need to pay between $60 and $100 per month to host all those images.

In addition, there are strange small fees that seem a bit stingy. For example, by default a website comes with 4-5 text pages – any non-gallery page with text on it, like your about page or the page where you describe your services. If you would like to add another text page, you have to pay a one-time fee of $15. Seems like an unnecessary way to extract a bit more from you.

Given all this, how much would it cost to set up a basic site? One time fees are $140, including flash template for $125 and an extra text page for $15. Monthly fees are $15 per month (for 200 or less total photos on your site). So the total for the first year: $320.

How much would it cost to set up a very complete site and take advantage of all Photobiz’s functionality? One time fees are $310, including flash tempate $125, HTML mirro4r $45, shopping cart and online ordering $125, an extra text page $15. Monthly fees are $60-100 (for 1800-12000 photos on your site). Total cost for first year: $1030-$1510.

Needless to say, that’s quite a bit. Obviously you’re getting a lot for the money. And, of course, if you compare it with the cost of hiring a web designer to create a flash html site with e-commerce functionality – which would cost $1500-5000 – it seems reasonable. But the difference is that if you keep your site with Photobiz, you will continue to pay this amount year after year, rather than just once for your own site. And the appropriate comparison here is not your own designer, but other templates you might consider.

Grade: C-

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Flash-based websites have traditionally created problems for search engines. This is of critical importance, since most traffic to most websites comes via search engines. What’s the point of having a beautiful site if it can’t be found?

The problem with flash is that search engines see your whole “flash unit” for lack of a better term, as a single image or video with no readable information. Because the text is effectively part of the flash animation, search engines cannot see it, and that’s how they generally determine the relevance of a given site. So you don’t get the same benefits of a text rich website.

There are a number of ways to mitigate the negative SEO-effects. Photobiz is obviously aware of this and provides a means to add meta tags to each of your pages.

From their FAQ: “Can I optimize my website for search engines? You will have the ability to add meta-tags to your website. We also offer useful links to submit your website for free to major search engines.”

But this only gets you so far. In addition to the internal SEO challenges, another related problem is that you can’t link to any of the individual pages on your site. You can only link to your homepage.

Grade: D

FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES

Photobiz offers a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know how easy it is to ask for a refund, but I’ll take them at their word and assume it’s relatively straight forward.

Grade: A

CONCLUSION

In short, Photobiz offers an impressive array of beautiful flash templates, and allows you to switch between them for free. The templates, the back end management system, and online ordering system underscore that Photobiz has some great designers who know how to make websites that look great and are very easy to use, all while packing powerful functionality.

On the downside, Photobiz occupies the most expensive end of the spectrum for template-style solutions at $300-$1500 for the first year. It lacks flexibility for tweaking a site if you are the tech-savvy type and, more important, lacks any blogging functionality. It’s online order system, while elegant, does not offer any order fulfillment, so you still have to do that part yourself.

Overall Grade: B+/A-

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This is the third article in a series on the best photography website templates. Also see:

The Best Photography Website Templates: Introducing a New Series

Review of Photobiz Website Templates

Also, Photocrati has just released an outstanding set of WordPress themes for photographers. Unlike Photobiz, Printroom, and most other solutions, these templates combine gallery management and blogging in one package.

Overview of Printroom.com Online Storefronts

Printroom.com offers online storefronts for photographers. Although still in the realm of website templates, Printroom.com is an entirely kind of solution from Photobiz-style templates. After setting up an account, you upload images to your Printroom site. They offer very few choices regarding the appearance of your “homepage” or galleries, and very little flexibility. The major advantage of Printroom and similar sites like Smugmug is the integration of galleries, shopping carts, and order fulfillment. In a Printroom store, your clients can browse images, select what they want in terms of print sizes and styles, speciality items, even digital downloads. They checkout and pay, and Printroom alerts you to the order. If you have not done so already, they will ask you to upload high resolution versions of the relevant images. And that’s it. Printroom handles all order fulfillment – printing, packaging, shipping.

I’d like to emphasize something up front. In some sense, comparing Printroom or other “pro storefronts” to full-blown website solutions like Photobiz is unfair. I can’t imagine any pro photographer using a Printroom store front as their sole or even primary online presence. Printroom just doesn’t offer the kind of attractive templates or customization options that allow photographers to present their online portfolios in all their glory. Usually, Printroom is a secondary site, one used to store client images after a shoot and give clients the ability to browse and, most important, order prints. That’s the best use of Printroom.

Overall Appearance

I personally find this to be a weak aspect of Printroom.com. They are not alone, sadly. Compared to the beauty and elegance of Photobiz flash templates, I find both the home pages and gallery pages at most printing-companies-cum-online-storefronts to be elementary looking and clumsy, especially the galleries. Above is a screen shot of my Printroom.com homepage; below is a shot of one of my galleries.

The design elements are very basic. The homepage is passable, although very lacking in flexibility. The galleries are just unnecessarily ugly. I don’t like using such a strong word, but if a duck quacks…  I’ve spent a lot of time staring at my gallery page, trying to figure out what bothers me about the look. It’s partly the white “shadows” cast to the right and bottom of each image. It’s partly the design of the toggle boxes and magnifying glasses.

The individual images page are just a bit better. Here is a screenshot:

I like the large image with thumbnails on top. But the little table to the right of the images, where clients are supposed to type the number and type of images they want, have the same 1990s-clumsy-but-gets-the-job-done look. It’s just a plain flat table with hard square lines.

And, again, the final shopping cart, pictured below, has the same look.

I have to admit that the appearance may not bother everyone. I’m continually trying to figure out if it really is ugly, or if it’s just a matter of personal taste. I’ve provided the screen shots, so ultimately you can decide.

New Flash Sites

Printroom may recognize that they are lacking the design area. They have very recently introduced new Flash websites. These sites are a marked improvement over the basic html homepages of yesteryear (above). They are quite passable. But, again, all things in comparison. Compared to Photobiz templates, the Printroom Flash templates look like first drafts. They have somehow managed to import the same clunky looking into their flash sites that undermines their html sites. Here are three sample flash website that Photobiz links to as samples.

http://www.printroom.com/studio_homepage.asp?userid=robynsdesigns

http://www.printroom.com/studio_homepage.asp?userid=ClarkLara

http://www.printroom.com/studio_homepage.asp?userid=rarroyo02

Looking at these, I am somehow underwhelmed. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that the image areas are all the same stock light gray, or if its the use of tabs for the menu, or the overall sense that the site has chunks (background and image area) that don’t work together as a unified whole.

Grade: D for HTML sites, C for Flash sites

Ease of Use

This is a mixed area for Printroom. The main back-end management area is good enough. Below are three screenshots to give you a sense of the feel and functionality of the Printroom Backend. The first is a screen shot of what you see when you first log in. You can see the various menu items (square buttons) and you can see a list of galleries. The second screen shot is what you see if you click on a gallery. Here, you can change image names and order proofs. Finally the third screenshot is the page on which you set prices for prints and products of various sizes. You can prices specific for each gallery, which allows you to tailor your pricing to particular clients (say wedding versus your travel poster gallery).

I find this back-end management area fairly easy to use, which is a big feat given the amount of functionality for ordering and pricing. For image uploading, they encourage you to use their own software, Pro Studio Manager, which you download and install on your computer. This software allows you to create galleries, import images, delete images, and make other adjustments on your computer. You then upload or synchronize, and the software batch uploads your images and re-creates any changes.

I must say that I found this to be an awkward solution. I don’t like having to down load new software, first of all. But then you have to be vary cautious about making changes within the backend management area, since synchronization seems to run just one way, from Pro Studio Manager to your site. They encourage to you to make ALL changes in their software. I guess it just seems to me that there should be a simpler way – something that’s quick and easy and online.

(By the way, while we’re on the topic of ease of use, there is one more thing to comment on. Printroom makes another software package called Printroom direct, which is supposed to allow Photographers to upload images and order prints and products easily and separate from whether or not you have a Printroom storefront. AVOID this at all costs. When I was doing a lot of work with Printroom, this software was the bane of my existence. It’s slow, impenetrable, and senseless. Well, I should add a caveat. I haven’t used the software in over a year. I thought about trying it again so I could include something in this review, but I just can’t do it. I like you, my readers, but not that much.)

Grade: B

Flexibility of Design

This is another weak spot (there are strong spots, really, coming below). Printroom store fronts offer very little flexibility and very few options for customization.
As with Photobiz, you don’t have access to the source files that comprise you’re site, so you can’t make any individual tweaks you might like. You can’t add extra notes and announcements or elements to your home page. For technically skilled people, this may be a big turn-off.  At Photobiz, this lack of access is offset a bit because they’ve provided a good number of built-in options. You’re still hostage to the options they provide, but at least there are options. Printroom provides very few options for customization of your pages.

In fact, you can see for yourself. Here is your online store front set up page. This includes all the options you have:

They have added a new bit of flexibility with the option of flash websites. But again, the options for customization seem quite limited once you’ve had a chance to fool around with Photobiz. Below is the how Printroom describes the functionality and customization options of their Flash pages:
* Sleek, clean design
* Create your own slideshow- upload up to 15 of your images
* Upload your logo- or create a text header with a wide selection of fonts
* Custom background colors to match your style
* About Us page, Contact Us page, and a custom page that you can define
* Online tool allows you to create your site in minutes
* Integrated Storefront with your photo galleries displayed right on your homepage

If you want to test drive their “flash homepage tool” you can do so and get a very clear sense for what’s possible. Click on the demo link here:

http://www.printroom.com/info/Store_Front_Designer.asp?

Grade: D

Blogging Capability

None. There is no blogging capability. If want to maintain a blog, you would need to host it on a different server and different domain name. Given the importance of blogging today as a critical way to interact with past or potential clients, that’s a surprising omission and big, big limitation, as least as far as I’m concerned.

Grade: F

E-Commerce Functionality

Now we finally move solidly into one of the big strength areas of Printroom. Indeed, it is the main reason Printroom exists. Printroom is a storefront. It’s designed to provide browsable galleries in which client can select, customize, and order photos. Although the appearance isn’t always elegant, it does this very well.

One of the big weaknesses of Photobiz is that although they have a shopping cart, they do cannot provide any order fulfillment services. Well, Printroom is a printing company. So the integration between online shopping and order fulfillment is essentially seamless. If you are not picky about which photo lab you use, this can be a HUGE time saver.

As I noted in the introduction, Printroom is not really designed to be a stand alone website solution. Most photographer use it as a secondary site to host photos for clients and provide online ordering options. For that purpose, the seamless integration of galleries, online shopping carts, payment, and order fulfillment is great.

Grade: A

Cost and Fee Structure

The fee structure for Printroom is fairly straightforward. They offer three membership levels. The first level is free. That’s right, you can set up a Printroom storefront for free. This membership comes with limited space for images, no option for flash websites, and limited support from Printroom, but it’s still a good way to get started. How does Printroom make money? Easy – they charge you when you order prints. Printroom is after all a printing company. They figure if you set up a free account with them, and upload galleries, you are more likely to use their printing services. Which is true.

At the second level you can buy a pro member ship for $9.99 per month or $99 per year. This membership comes with 1GB of storage space, the option to use flash, and more or less full support. It’s important to note that this compares very favorably with Photobiz, which costs more than $99 just for initial set up PLUS a much higher monthly fee. At $99 per year, Printroom pro is still a very affordable solution.

At the third level, you can buy a premium membership for $199 per year or $19.99 per month. This level comes with unlimited storage and a range of options like the ability to create a fully customized flash website and priority support from Printroom.

In addition to their monthly or annual fee, Printroom also charge a printing cost, but this would be paid anywhere and Printroom’s charges for printing are quite reasonable. A 4X6 print costs $0.39 and an 8X10 $2.99.

Grade: A

Search Engine Optimization

This is a huge weak area for Printroom. Despite the fact that the URL for my Printroom includes my name (www.printroom.com/pro/erickdanzer), my Printroom site has never shown up on the first page of search results EVEN WHEN SEARCHING FOR MY OWN NAME. Needless to say, if your site doesn’t show up when you search for yourself, you’ve got problems. I just did a test and searched for myself. My Printroom site shows up on page 4 of search results. By comparison, my main site erickdanzer.com is the number one result, and my Photobiz site shows up on page one.

I don’t what the problem is with Printroom’s SEO structure, but it is clearly not a place where you will “be found” unless someone is actively looking for you.

Grade: F

Free Trials and Guarantees

Photobiz offers a free membership, so you can test drive it completely as long as you like. Hard to beat that for free trials.

Grade: A

Conclusion

In short, Printroom offers a great service: seamless integration of online galleries, print ordering and shopping cart functionality, payment processing, and photo printing and order fulfillment. This kind of service is hugely convenient if you shoot events and want to offer browsable galleries and online ordering to clients. And they offer this service at a very reasonable price. Back-end management is reasonably straightforward

On the downside, their online storefronts and galleries can be visually unappealing. They’ve made some improvements in this area with the introduction of Flash websites, but even their Flash sites are not nearly as beautiful or elegant as some of the others out there. In addition, Printroom sites lack flexibility and options for customization (with some exception for premium members), lack blogging capability, and have an awkward system for image uploading. These sites are terrible as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

The bottom line, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that Printroom probably isn’t a good option for a stand alone site to represent your work, but it is a good secondary option for offering galleries and online ordering to clients. For you main web site — the online portfolio that represents you to the world — you will want a solution that offers more visual impact, greater flexibility, and, ideally, blogging capability.

Overall Grade: C

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Note: Photocrati has just released an outstanding set of WordPress-based photography website templates. Unlike most solutions I’ve looked at in this series, they combine both gallery management and blogging in one package. I may be biased, since I’m involved with Photocrati, but I think they’re an awesome solution.

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While I’ve done weddings and portraits in the past to supplement income from my other photographic work, I recently entered the waters of wedding and portrait photography more thoroughly. As part of the new venture, I needed a new website dedicated exclusively to wedding and portrait photography.

These days, there are tons of great website templates and pro storefronts available to photographers: Printroom, Smugmug, BetterPhoto, ifp3, Snapfish, Foliolink, and others. Although all of these solutions have limitations, they also offer some great websites. Unless you’re a web guru or have lots of money to burn, there’s really no reason to build a site from scratch.

In the past, and in my more recent search, I’ve examined or tested a wide range of photo website templates. There are almost no genuine reviews of what’s out there, and the information provided by the sites themselves is obvious biased and limited, so you often have to actually buy and test a templates to really see if it’s the right fit.

The aim of this series is give photographers a better and more systematic basis for choosing their web template. So over the next couple of months, I’m going to write reviews of all the major web template providers. Here’s the list of site providers you’ll hear about over the next two months:

BetterPhoto
Big Black Bag
Foliolink
ifp3
Photobiz
PortfolioSiteZ
Printroom
SiteWelder
SmugMug
Snapfish
Wordpress Templates (from various providers)

I’ll also prepare a article with a round-up review of general template sites like Template Monster, Entheos, and Flash Mint. These are huge template shops that provide photography templates along with many, many others. While they have nice looking templates, they generally don’t anticipate photographers’ needs as well as sites dedicated to photographers.

That’s still an incomplete list, and I’ll add additional sites as I find them. If you know of good quality photography template providers, please let me know in the comments.

In order to be systematic and provide a basis for effective comparison, we’ll be looking each of the following aspects, which reflect some of the features I think are important for today’s photographers.

OVERALL APPEARANCE
FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN
BLOGGING CAPABILITY
E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY
COST AND FEE STRUCTURE
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES
CONCLUSION (INCLUDING PROS AND CONS)

I’ll provide screen shots of sample websites and links to demos built from the templates as well as screen shots of the back end management system so you’ll know what you’re really getting into.

The first review will cover Photobiz, which is the provider I ultimately chose for a new wedding and portrait site. While I like the look, Photobiz also come with important limitations that I’m just now encountering. Look for the first review by early next week.

UPDATE: I’ve since switched my sites to PHOTOCRATI. It’s based on WordPress, which is the fastest growing platform for websites, build for blogging, and among the most SEO friendly platforms.

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