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Creating your own website can be a pleasure

A bright idea : make your own website !

If you need a website, the first bifurcation on your road will be : do you hire someone to make your site or do you make it yourself? Please allow me to tell you a personal story.

Some years ago I was a small clothing manufacturer and needed to have a website for my company. Having no idea on how to do it myself, I hired a website developer. Well, he surely built a site for me. But I really don’t know who made the biggest part of the work, if it was me or the developer. Besides having little freedom to choose the looks of my site, I had to provide all pictures of my products and the respective names,explanations, details, prices and so on in a short span of time. That didn’t work out well for me, for I needed time to mature ideas about the website. And, of course, the developer wanted to finish his work as soon as possible.

Well, after some months I started using that website. Soon I discovered how difficult it was to make changes on it , like adding new types of products, alter specifications and so on. I had to contact the developer for almost everything and he used to charge for all extra work. The worst part was changing logos, colors of titles, headlines, backgrounds etc.

Building a website yourself can be very gratifying and cost-effective. It also means considering new ideas, changing colors, new images, new products, new functionalities, an so on. It allows you to use your imagination and your artistic skills. But all this can be achieved only if you have an intimate knowledge of how things work inside the website, and that you can achieve by creating it from zero.

You should know that building a site from scratch won’t take a week, or a month. It can take several months or a little longer, depending on how much time you can dedicate to the task. But if you aren’t in a hurry, you can be rewarded with a very pleasurable hobby and source of income . And I can assure you that this is perfectly possible. At the beginning I had no clue how to start a website. Now it is almost ready and will be launched soon!

And, of course, if you really don’t have the time to make your website, hiring a developer can always be a solution.

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How to build a Microstock website for selling your own photos

Find a nice place to work
Have a good cup of coffee or tea
And… take it easy !

One day this idea came to me : why not start a small private Microstock ? After all, I had about 10.000 digital files stored on the laptop. A part of them really good pictures, most of them taken during trips to interesting places. Sitting idle in my computer ! Maybe I could convert them into a business, monetize them.

It’s been now almost one year since then. I didn’t expect to achieve my goal very fast. After all, when you are someone who’ve never developed anything on the Internet, the thought of building an own website sounds like planning a trip to the Moon. I simply had no idea of how this all worked or what steps to take.

So, I began researching Google and found several companies offering platforms to start a website. They all offer different possibilities and plans, each one with its own characteristics. There are platforms almost ready to be used, where you have only to choose the theme of your site (the appearance of it) and upload your pictures. There are other companies where you can have an online shop for selling your pictures and even other products, like printings and objects depicting your photos, like mugs, calendars, etc . Of course that comes in very handy, but keep in mind that those platforms charge a percentage of your earnings and also that you become dependent on them.

And there are those platforms where you need to start your site from zero. If you don’t understand anything about websites, this is the difficult way. But if you choose it, you will be rewarded with your independence and won’t have to pay anything when selling your products (by that I mean your digital files, prints or other objects).

Beware : when you research possible platforms for your site, all of them claim that you can build your website or your shop in just about 30 minutes! This can be true if you are a super professional in the area , know exactly what you want, how to build your site and have all the images and informations already at your disposal. In my case, I’ve been almost a year now on this road, but I have enjoyed a lot every new achievment . My site is still under construction. I want it to look professional and to work smoothly.

Feel free to leave your comments. It would be great to get to know other photographers who are also interested in this subject !

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Making money with photos

Hi everybody !

Here I tell my adventures in building a private Image Bank, i.e., a Microstock website with my own photos. The difference in my case is that I intend to offer my pictures directly to customers, whereas normal Microstock companies stock up and sell images from other people. I hope you will profit from my experience !

Feel free to leave your comments. It would be great to get to know other photographers who are also interested in this subject !

Of course I admit that sending our own digital files to a Microstock is very easy and trouble free. However, there are important points to consider. Nowadays those big image banks are behemoths , having sometimes hundreds of thousands and even millions of files on stock. So, the material that we upload to those Photo Stocks will have to compete with such a huge amount of other people photos that our chances get really small. And, if we happen to sell something, we’ll have to share a considerable amount of our earnings with them.

This blog will continue …