There are all kinds of ways to develop a website from hand coded, to Macromedia Dreamweaver and its ilk. I have basically stuck to hand coded, and simple. You can go through my pages and see how I have progressed the meanderings subdomain is the oldest code, then the journal, then the mainsite, graywolfphoto, and finally the presscamera site is the most recent (be warned that there are some things on it that are not finished, but were thrown up to get some content online). The thing about hand code is that it is the most time consuming way to set up a site, but the easiest to maintain because you know what you did, and it is readable. My site is about as basic in design as you can get and still show photographs.
All of that takes up about 21MB, though a big chunk of that is the Press Camera Forum database which needs some customizing real soon now. My hosting service, Detail Hosting, provides 250MB for $5.95 a month. They provide all the services needed to run a business site on their servers. They have been down 24 hours twice that I know of since I started with them in September last year, both times because of denial of service attacks. Mine is not a high traffic site. Together the 4 websites together gets about 1700 visits a month (13,000 hits).
There is code out there for free to do about anything you might want to do. The most useful to you will probably be automatic thumbnail generation and presentation software. You will probably want a database of your photos, and an online sales service (shopping cart & secure payment software) also. One of the most useful tools for maintaining a site is "grep". Grep is a Unix utility (versions for windows are available), and it's free, that allows you to do a search and replace across a bunch of files. For example if you change your email address you can use grep to do a search and replace on every page on your website in one operation.
Hope this answers a few of your questions.
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Shel Belinkoff wrote:
Hi ...
My ISP allows me a fair amount of free space, but it's not enough for a really nice web site. So, being somewhat of a dummy here, what should I look for from an ISP in setting up a site, and what things should I be thinking about including. Naturally, it's all about photos, presenting them well, using the site as a way to present pics to some markets, and possible to sell from.
What type of design features should I consider, and why? How about the underlying code? It's gotta be compatible
with as many browsers as possible, fast loading, etc. Thoughts here?
Who's doing this? Suggestions eagerly anticipated.
shel
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
