<p>As I have done more and more with my photograph hobby, I want to take it to the next level - sharing my joys and my skills (free). Therefore, I need to have a website. Apparently, people want to see your work before accepting your “free” services.</p>
<p>I do have a computer and a high speed cable internet service. Where should I start to build a website? Since this is a cost center rather a revenue generating center, I don’t want to spend any significant amount of money on it. </p>
<p>This might not be exactly what you are looking for, by one can post their portfolio online for free at d a p o r t f o l i o . c o m My daughter put her photographs online then referenced the location on her college applications. She got tons of positive feedback.</p>
<p>Can you set up a Facebook account strictly for your photo hobby? It’s so easy to set up albums for others to see; I know they’re not the highest quality reproduction but would certainly give people an idea of your skills.</p>
<p>Charges are nominal and support is good. The websites look professional and provide all the tools to analyze the traffic.
But all of my websites are for browsing only and don’t offer any services.</p>
<p>dad II, you could do something like what jg said above. if you find a free site like that it would probably be okay. I’m a free lance web designer on the side (just something fun) and if i could make a suggestion… if you hire someone like what the above poster mentioned I would suggest something rather simple that way it’s easy for you to update and also so that the design of the site isn’t too busy - you don’t want it to take away from the photos you plan on displaying. you could also check out godaddy, i believe they have website services as well.</p>
<p>I’ll second google sites; super easy, at least until you out grow it. Alternatively, for paid hosting site I like ipage.com; I’ve used ipage and GoDaddy, and find ipage much easier, and their 24/7 support via ichat is great. They are inexpensive, and run sales which make it even cheaper.</p>
<p>DS uses, flickr and Picassa. I think, at least that’s how we get to see his pix. He has 3 pix published with credit attribution. He uses Utube (published) and Vimeo for video.</p>
<p>He’s taken a course with Art Wolf and of course watches his PBS shows regularly.</p>
<p>Dad II, you could start with Blogger, which is really easy to learn. I know artists who use it as their primary website. It’s easy to post pictures and keep organized. It’s a start, anyway.</p>
<p>I have a program called Adobe Lightroom on my computer. It is a workflow program that I use to store (catalog) pictures on my computer, adjusted the brightness/contrast/etc, upload to Facebook, create slideshows, and it also has the capacity of creating webpages.</p>
<p>If I used that feature (which I don’t), it allows me to upload a webpage with my pictures straight to the server that will host them. It does all of the work, all I would have to do is setup the server information and click upload.</p>
<p>I’d recommend the program. It does cost a little bit but not much more than a basic lens that you might have for your camera.</p>
<p>if you have adobe photoshop it can do the same thing that babyontheway mentioned. I’ve used it quite a few times to create a quick gallery of photos. </p>
<p>mom2, i’ve never used their web page building services so I can’t really attest to how good or bad they are. I saw go daddy had some example pages set up and they look decent. Never used the other sites. I just use go daddy for my domain name registration because they are so cheap. I host my site elsewhere.</p>