[Robin Ramsay]

Greetings. I have been in business for several years. I have had a great deal of luck e-mailing my potential clients my photos using a simple photo sharing service. Picasa Web Albums - robin - landscape shots . Having a web site could only be beneficial. My problem is i don't know where to start and I don't want to get locked into something and find out it's not the right thing.

My clients are mostly cottagers or retired living in a rural setting. High speed isn't always available.

I've been quoted between 400 and 1800 dollars. quite a difference since I'm asking for the same thing. Any thoughts from the more internet savvy members is welcome.

[Stonehenge]

You get what you pay for.

If dial-up is what you think most of your clients have, then it's smart to keep file size in mind when putting together graphics, to make sure they are optimized for download speed.

Having the site search engine optimized out of the the box is also a good thing, and something many web designers don't quite manage to do, though more are including that.

I think the ideal for your stage is to have someone code your site as a Wordpress theme, which would allow you to add and change pages very easily. That's what I do for almost all the new sites I build now.

But yeah, look over the portfolios of the people you got bids from and contact those sites - the problem I often have with web people is that creatively they are brilliant, but they couldn't live up to their commitments to save their lives. So I'd ask about whether they got projects done on time.

I would imagine you aren't really able to look at the code of the site to see how well it was coded and add that to your considerations of how valuable each of the different designers is, so you'll just have to wing in on that one.

Good luck!

[yeahground]

It might be helpful if you tell us what you were asking for when getting your bids for the website.

The question you need to ask is ... what do I want this website to do for me.

A simple one page informational site is almost so easy as you may want to just look into doing it yourself.

You may even think about just doing a Myspace or Facebook for a simple informational site. Its free.

If you want to accept payments from your site then it gets a bit more complicated but not so bad.

Forums... guestbooks.. etc.. all add cost to the designer.

The raw cost of a website is 10.00 a year for the cost of a domain from places like: (godaddy)

However when you need to factor in hosting, its about 5.00 a month. So for a domain and hosting your talking about 70.00 a year just in cost to maintain a site.

The rest is all designing.

Yes I dabble in web design so I do know what I am talking about.

So, as I said... you need to know what you want your site to do for you.

I agree though that if your in any kind of business you should have some kind of website. Even if it is just a one page informational contact us type thing.

eeps sorry I didnt realize how old the post was.

[deiss]

you could go for a cheaper website and supplement it by heavily using the image galleries like you've already been doing (and which seem to be working for you). A gallery site like YardShare.com is free and gets loads of visitors who are all exposed to your work.

The more minimal the site the better though, I'd say you'd be fine with a small site and several collections of images on different gallery sites, given your target audience.