[Paul B]

A while ago I had the need to setup a photography portfolio / website.

I needed it to point various people at shots for proposed articles or other things where Flickr etc. just wouldn't do. In the end I settled for a 500px.com portfolio / site as they were emerging as a promising photo sharing website and their portfolios were very quick and easy to setup. I guess it's questionable as I still need this function.
 
I also use Flickr which is a mish-mash of holiday snaps, general clutter and the odd OK photograph. I started paying for this service at some point as you needed to in order to upload high-res images and have >200 (I'm not sure this is currently the case, you're allowed 1Tb now for free I think?). I fully intended to move over to 500px at some point but their lack of an easy way to embed images put me off.

Well, I just had a domain name reminder and a 500px reminder and it struck me that 500px hasn't ended up being quite what I expected. They're heading very much to the social media side of things (as are Flickr who are intent on ruining their UI further). I'd also imagine that cumulatively I'm paying over the odds.Last year I had the same thoughts but given I was leaving for a USA-trip I just ignored them.

500px are currently updating their portfolios to enable more customisation amongst other things but their themes are a little lacking (not everything needs a square crop!).

I'm not quite sure what the best options is? I've been doing some back-end work on a Wordpress installation and although I've found it to be very intuitive it didn't take long before I encountered basic problems (i.e. blog posts images opening in a lightbox rather than allowing you to link them to say, sponsor sites). I know Dave used WP for a while then promptly got fed up of chopping it around to function how he wished.

This is turning into a bit of a long winded post. So basically do I stick with 500px and Flickr (if I can now get their services for free) or is it worth investing some time into a WP site or similar (similar being a non-expensive option)?

Thanks for reading this far 

[Johnny Brown]

Do you have a budget? If the point of it is to sell shots, or show editors stuff, then forget social bumlicking sites and look at ecommerce sites like photoshelter or zenfolio. You want to be able to upload a gallery from Lightroom, send an editor a private link, and offer hi-res download permission with a password, and have any such downloads logged.

Having said that the vast majority of sales I have made have involved lo-res attached to email, followed by hi-res by FTP. Unless you are illustrating a book your edits should be tight enough to use email. My photoshelter account definitely costs a lot more than it has been worth. I don't think Ray Wood has ever bothered with a website and he is about the most professional of the climbing photographers.

[Paul B]

My budget as ever would be as cheap as possible, I've generally got a fair amount of time but then again, I'd rather it didn't turn into a time sponge. Funnily enough my NAS is capable of doing the gallery stuff you mention but frustratingly the software requires you to duplicate all of the images for it to do this (utterly ridiculous).

Having said that the vast majority of sales I have made have involved lo-res attached to email, followed by hi-res by FTP. Unless you are illustrating a book your edits should be tight enough to use email.

Low-res followed by FTP has been my experience thus far. Sometimes JPGs from the 5dII will blow other peoples attachment limits.

I don't think Ray Wood has ever bothered with a website and he is about the most professional of the climbing photographers.

Yes, there's always the question whether or not it's at all necessary.