Moving to Photium?
31st January 2009
After several years of building websites from scratch, for the last six years using Softpress Freeway, I'm close to a watershed moment.
Freeway is a powerful site-building application, and I've built a number of sites for myself and for clients, using its ability to generate high quality CSS-based sites. But I've never found Freeway quite as easy and straightforward to use as to keep my photo site regularly updated. So I looked around for something that might be a bit more down'n'dirty, fast'n'easy to do the 2009 rebuild of lochaberphoto.co.uk
My first stop was RapidWeaver, which had been on my radar for some time. Not as boundless in its possiblities as Freeway, RapidWeaver is a template-based web design app, and I liked the look and feel of some of the templates. So a trade-off of the flexibility of a ground-up site-builder like Freeway has to offer, but for a photographer who likes to be out there shooting, the speed and ease of RapidWeaver had a lot to offer. The templates are easily edited/ customised, and it provided almost all I wanted, but with one major omission: no viable e-commerce template for the display of my photographic prints.
Next up was the discovery of a burgeoning segment of the web dedicated to providing photographers in particular with customisable, template-based sites built directly in the browser. I'm trying ClikPic and Photium. This is the Photium iteration of my site. In six hours or so - ok, I'm just slow! - I've set up a rudimentary site comprising homepage, blog and a gallery with e-commerce capability, as well as a Contact page and an "About Me" bit.
Is this the way forward?
I'm going to sleep on that, but this does seem the most hopeful prospect at present.
Downside? Yes, there is one. Templates are less customisable than RapidWeaver's, and in particular I think the page width - which is fixed and common to all the (limited range of 4) templates available - is a bit to narrow. Also the large images in the gallery could be a bit bigger, I think...
However, it feels like a day of a bit more accomplishment than some I've spent when involved in the annual site-updating throes. So like I said, I'll sleep on this, and see how it looks tomorrow!
Jim Stewart
Freeway is a powerful site-building application, and I've built a number of sites for myself and for clients, using its ability to generate high quality CSS-based sites. But I've never found Freeway quite as easy and straightforward to use as to keep my photo site regularly updated. So I looked around for something that might be a bit more down'n'dirty, fast'n'easy to do the 2009 rebuild of lochaberphoto.co.uk
My first stop was RapidWeaver, which had been on my radar for some time. Not as boundless in its possiblities as Freeway, RapidWeaver is a template-based web design app, and I liked the look and feel of some of the templates. So a trade-off of the flexibility of a ground-up site-builder like Freeway has to offer, but for a photographer who likes to be out there shooting, the speed and ease of RapidWeaver had a lot to offer. The templates are easily edited/ customised, and it provided almost all I wanted, but with one major omission: no viable e-commerce template for the display of my photographic prints.
Next up was the discovery of a burgeoning segment of the web dedicated to providing photographers in particular with customisable, template-based sites built directly in the browser. I'm trying ClikPic and Photium. This is the Photium iteration of my site. In six hours or so - ok, I'm just slow! - I've set up a rudimentary site comprising homepage, blog and a gallery with e-commerce capability, as well as a Contact page and an "About Me" bit.
Is this the way forward?
I'm going to sleep on that, but this does seem the most hopeful prospect at present.
Downside? Yes, there is one. Templates are less customisable than RapidWeaver's, and in particular I think the page width - which is fixed and common to all the (limited range of 4) templates available - is a bit to narrow. Also the large images in the gallery could be a bit bigger, I think...
However, it feels like a day of a bit more accomplishment than some I've spent when involved in the annual site-updating throes. So like I said, I'll sleep on this, and see how it looks tomorrow!
Jim Stewart
