Just sharing this info with you.

Found this easy & free soluction for building a website.

http://www.wix.com

Yes and completely over the top animation/sound design - instead of your photography being on display the web site is. Yuk!

Thanks for the link. I'm not a big fan of Flash, but used well it can be useful and entertaining. Used badly and it makes my teeth itch!
Jon

It's like any other tool - it can be used for good or ill. I always advise clients to use it where it helps to highlight an important idea or better present a message or explain a difficult concept. But the most important advice, IMHO, is to have it run only once. Else motion is such a powerful attractant to the eye that it competes with your message, photos, or other content.

Pixelpost (http://www.pixelpost.org) is in my opinion a much better option for building photo websites, though it is true that it is more aimed at blogs than static websites.

I used AutoViewer (http://www.simpleviewer.net/products/autoviewer/) for my website. It's also Flash, but it's not that bad. Since I like it puristic, I don't need a lot of stuff on my page:

http://leuthard.ch

Regards Thomas

Thanks for this smart tip. We are working on flash animations too, we built our website with autoweb-creator.com - online website builder .

We have used banner http://www.bannersnack.com/banner-maker/ to make flash animations. It's true that flash animations are not a great way to get good rankings but it definitely gives a real style to the web-page when used properly.
Check out our animated street-wear fashion pics at ellen-clothing-manufacturer.com. They have been made using a basic digital camera and a couple of hours of work on photoshop.

Banner snack is not a free service but it is really easy to use.
Autoweb-creator.com is also free, with a paid option to get your own URL. The great part is that your website is then featured on the homepage which is great to get visibility quickly.

I definitely recommend all of the above.

Search machines don't like totally designed flash presentations as they look for key words within the site beyond the meta-tags and they don't find any within a flash
but
it is very well usable within your site even for photo-presentation, creating a total experience of all senses, auditive, visual, movement.
An artistic mix of photos with video and music is growing on the web but this requires knowledge of video-editing turned into flash,
a medium used by many renomated photographers finding new ways to express their art.

Flash did get indeed a bad name by the disturbing abuse of it in spite that many photographers like this medium to present their work in a sober way,
it skips all the webcoding changing day to day but it skips indeed also all the search machines.

example http://www.carldekeyzer.com/

What if you don't like the music? I've found pretty much all flash sites I've tried utterly annoying and hard to navigate with different things popping up and down, slide shows starting automatically, confusing navigation, back button in webbrowser not working etc. Usually I get bored after a couple of minutes. Sorry to all flash-fans. =)

The Martin Parr site is pretty damn good. I'm assuming it's Flash. . .

I have been using Wix and finding it very frustrating. I like the way my site looks but its way too slow which is really killing it. I have started to rebuild in Iweb but again its got limitations particularly in the standard galleries. I am really finding web design a very frustrating experience it seems you need a lot of knowledge to break out or the standard templates. I only want to do simple things but find it so hard to even acheive these.....

I have been looking at dreamweaver but it just seems so complicated.

Does anyone have any advise on developing a simple website. The following is the link to my wix site:

http://www.jimmy-photo.com

Wordpress is supposed to be good and there are a lot of templates around for it. Quite a lot of Photography sites are made using it. I am going by what I have read, as I have yet to try it, but I intend to give it a go once I can sort it out with my ISP etc.

I will check it out JBA... I am almost tempted to go on a web design course as I am getting so frustrated with messing about with compromised systems. I never thought it would be quite as difficult to get something that I am happy with....!!!!

Ian,

If you need full customization, the only way to go is to build it yourself from scratch. I think going to a course and buying a good book will get you started.

And whatever you do, stay away from the dying technology called Flash :-)

/ Jacob

Thanks for this statement Jacob .... I'm fighting against flash for so long time and often I feel very lonely in it :)

I don't like these "kit tools", templates and such stuff - Also think the best way is something individual -
As I have no money I had to learn it self educated - Well of course I'm not a good programmer like Jacob but finally
I'm happy cause everything works as I need it and you can create what you have in mind.

But why don't you just use the 1x personal homepages?

I'm totally happy with Wordpress - build my own new website recently in less than 20 hours.
http://johan.nieuwerth.com/

It's 100% original Wordpress with only the "theme" customized, it has some custom jQuery javascript to display a Flickr photoset in a Fancybox gallery beneath the posts (see horizontal bar of small thumbnails - click and enlarge to see the Gallery effect) and some simple additional plugins (Twitter, mail to subscribers at each new post, etc.)

Great feature in recent Wordpress versions is that you can attach a "Thumbnail" to each post, but the functionality goes so far that you can make a main photograph of 990px wide as one of the "Thumbnail formats".

The additional image gallery underneath the main photo of each post, can the be added by simply pasting the Flickr Set ID into one of the Custom Fields of the post. One action to add a gallery, and theoretically speaking, the visitors can not even see that the large number of additional photographs in a post are actually coming from Flickr.

If anyone is interested on more details, feel free to ask or OEmail me, it's a nice hobby besides photography ;-)
Johan

John,

I checked out your site and it looks good. I like the way you represent your images as big as possible after all this is what a photographic website should be all about. I wil have a look at wordpress.

Sven,

I would use the 1x personal homepage but I have a domain name I am using and I dont think it can use it with the 1x homepage or I might be wrong.

Lots of options I just need to find the best one for me.

Let's see if I can reply to this quicker than Jacob... ;-)
YOU CAN!

You can point a custom domain name like www.ianjames.com to your 1X homepage and if you work with URL's internally in a consistent manner, the user will really stay on your own domain...

Johan

By the way, I also included this little EXIF viewer you can see on each post => it's also without much customization possible in Wordpress, the raw EXIF metadata gets stored automatically with each image in the Media Gallery.

What's written above about customization and building from scratch is very true, but what really can save a huge amount of time is to fully customize the front-end, but fully re-use functionality of the Back-End. Uploading / managing / publishing is extremely easy in the Wordpress back-end and I haven't changed a single line of code for it.

Johan

Ah the joys of web design the more I dig the more I realise how much I dont know about it. Knowledge is power as they say.

I am trying to get a feel for how well other people are accessing my website in term of speed of loading. I would appreciate if anyone who has a look could let me know how well it loaded? I am really reluctant to develop my WIX site as I think people are struggling to view it..... So yes I know the content lacking at the moment.

http://www.jimmy-photo.com

It appears a bit slow to me - the Flash loader to start with seems to "hang" for about 10 seconds.
I'm on a glass fibre network connection, so bandwith here cannot be the problem...