Weebly

Harold, I'm not sure how it would work for photography. I have used it for several years for a church website I built. I love the way it works. They are constantly adding things. Just recently they have vamped up the commercial side of things for you to add shopping cart and several other things to make it more modern and user friendly. I haven't taken advantage of it yet as I am waiting to see what happens with the new site changes for AW here. Weebly, at least for me, is very easy to work with.

I use it for my art school website. It's easy to use and update. Here is the link http://www.art-e-studio.net/

I have found it easy to use and the people running it seem to be good at offering help. Lots of different templates to use. It has a photo slide show or you can put up a FAA slideshow with links.

http://davidsreynolds.weebly.com/photos.html

Mine is a wip right now but I like weebly so far. I was with homestead for years and got tired of the monthly expense. I actually have 2 weeblys, one for this biz, one for my other biz. There is a thread here not too long ago about weebly.

http://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=1883073

Wendy St Christopher's great thread about Weebly, fyi

There it is! Thanks V :o))

Hi,
My recent website was made with Weebly, put days and weeks of work into it!

But then I switched over to squarespace, no I am not trying to advertise them, but they are MUCH MUCH better than these sites like websites. I am on the $8 a month plan (you can get discounts, just contact me if you want a discount code!)

Weebly is a very basic and simple website builder. Your photographs are absolutely stunning, and they would look much better on a Square space template.

Squarespace also gives you a custom domain (so no weebly included) and it is much easier to rank in google, they do ALL the work!

Here is my website at
www.joshbrnjac.com

Honestly I think it beats any weebly style!

Josh
please contact me if you need any help!

i have weebly looking for somewhere else right now. they changed their policy to make you pay for paypal buttons. also their themes are really limited. also you don't have full control over the code on your site. There are some simple things I want to do with my site and I can't there.

http://kimbird.weebly.com/

edit: that said. it has worked for me for the past couple of years. they have good seo tools that are easy to use. setting it up is pretty easy. and the staff are nice.

One of the downfalls I have found about using it for photography is that you can't send a link to someone (kind of like a lightbox) for them to look at a selection of image(s). If a designer/shopper looks at your Weebly site images and they click on any of them, they look great. You can set the images up so that if you click them they go to another site (i.e., FAA/AW), open in another window, or open there, etc. However, if you want to send a link to someone for a particular image or selection of images "on Weebly", you can't do it. It is simply a photo slide show or individual image show.

For instance, on Harold's photos (which are gorgeous, by the way, Harold) if you click on them, each one will have http://claybergphotography.weebly.com/color-gallery.html (or whatever gallery you are looking at) as the url. That makes it difficult for a designer or someone shopping your site to build a lightbox for themselves or refer their likes to someone else. That is the main thing that has kept me from using it as a photo site so far. I'm getting ready to build my site using GoDaddy's website builder and will use FAA as the backend for sales. Unless, of course, the changes to AW are substantial enough to change my mind.

AW?

Sorry, Kim. AW is ArtistWebsites, the individual site you get when you pay the $30/yr fee for FAA membership.

oh thanks carolyn

So far I like Weebly very much!

I have a Weebly site. I use it as a central links hub for all of my online galleries (AW, Zazzle, Oarttee) and social media (FB, Twitter, Pinterest, G+, LinkedIn). And I blog there, too. It works well for me.

http://aprilmoen.com

@ Carolyn

http://claybergphotography.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/7/3/30737435/3539656_orig.jpg

ctrl + click in the galllery overview gives you the .jpg in a new tab

@ Stanislav

That's right. What I'm talking about is a little different. Say you have a designer who has a project for a hotel and they have to get the images approved by someone at the hotel first. They go to Howard's website (for example) and find two in his color gallery and three in his b&w gallery that they like and want to be able to show them to the person at the hotel and then come back to buy them later. They can't bookmark the images while on the site because of the way it is set up. Neither can they save direct links to the images on the website to come back to. Sure, they can show the .jpgs, but if they want to come back to the site to buy it, they have to manually go through the galleries again, find the images again, and then purchase. You really need to be able to have a direct url back to the images on the site. Imagine if there are 10 different ones on the site that are all over a portfolio with many galleries of 1,000s of images. That would be very discouraging to someone trying to find them all again without a direct route back to them. Ideally, you would like to be able to set up lightboxes to save your favorites in but, short of that, a url at least keeps someone from having to go through all the trouble finding the images again.

I just looked at April's Weebly site. Nice setup, April. She has it set up so that it does work the way I was referring to. Her images are linked directly back to her AW site, so that is a direct link that helps. If you have a lot of images, that's a lot of work setting them up that way because you have to link them each one individually. Or, instead of having the individual images there like April has, you could just put a placeholder image for each "gallery" on the AW site and link back to the gallery instead. Having the images set up the way Harold has them is great when you are just wanting to show images in a portfolio or slideshow type arrangements, but not to sell. Unless, of course, you have them linked to where they can be purchased somewhere else.

Thank you, Carolyn!

I opted not to put the shopping cart on my website because it didn't display correctly on mobile devices. I would encourage all of you to verify that on your smartphones since that seems to be the way technology is headed.

Hi everyone,

Thanks to everyone for the help and suggestions. The weebly site is still a work in progress.