Archive of Business Posts

Creating A Facebook “Fan” Page

26 Jun
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Filed Under: Business, Photography, Web Development

I know I’m late to the party, but I have created a Facebook “fan page” for my photog­raphy. The term “fan page” is kind of deceiving, it’s more of a small business page, but that’s what Facebook calls it. PhotoShelter was generous enough to provide an excellent getting started e-book that I used to under­stand what was needed for my page.

A little customization is good, so I created the tower graphic you see at the right as the “profile picture” for my page. It’s style is set up to match my PhotoDeck port­folio site as well as my Bob Rockefeller Photography blog.

Probably the most important thing early on is to get the 25 “likes” that Facebook requires to allow your page to have its own, custom, URL. Mine is now www​.facebook​.com/​B​o​b​R​o​c​k​e​f​e​l​l​e​r​P​h​o​t​o​g​raphy.

When that’s done, you can create different “like” buttons and boxes (the one at the top of this post is a box) by using the tools in Facebook’s developer area.

We all know that Facebook is becoming a nearly ubiq­uitous way to commu­nicate with friends and even potential customers. Having your own Facebook page for your business, as separate from you personally, provides another way to make yourself known and to steer people to your other web tools for more information.

Finding A Photo Sales Site

2 Jan
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Filed Under: Business, Opinion, Photography

When I starting looking to upgrade from my SquareSpace website it wasn’t because SquareSpace was a poor place to host a website. Quite to the contrary. But it was not well suited for photog­raphy sales because there are no built-in e-commerce features.

I wanted a site that offered a profes­sional looking and attractive combi­nation of port­folio display and robust e-commerce options for print sales in a range of sizes and paper stocks. Doing some basic web research with Google searches and reading photog­raphy forums, I found a group of potential services: live­Books, PhotoShelter, SmugMug, Zenfolio, PhotoDeck and Pictage. Services such as Flickr and Picasa are very good for simple and casual photo sharing, but they’re just not intended for e-commerce.

Another important feature I wanted was the ability to closely mesh the new e-commerce site with my blog; I wanted the expe­rience for visitors to be seamless as they switched from one to the other. Some time ago I had done some exper­i­menting with SmugMug and Zenfolio and found that their customization abil­ities didn’t go as far as I wanted. Pictage’s feature list doesn’t promote customization and so that left me with live­Books, PhotoShelter and PhotoDeck in the running.

Each of those sites allowed very generous trial period terms — live­Books and PhotoDeck completely free for two weeks and PhotoShelter for $1 for two weeks. That was enough time for me to do a good bit of work with each over the holidays to find the best fit for me. Let me say that any of these three services would suit many profes­sionals; they are each very capable and produce wonderful, feature rich sites for both the photog­rapher as well as web visitors. I can recommend any of the three.

For my own personal circum­stances, live­Books’ templates did not work well for verti­cally oriented photos and I create many portrait style images. This ruled them out for me. Some many not like the fact that they are a Flash based site with a “ghost” site in HTML for the search engines.

PhotoShelter offers a powerful and flexible service. Its all there. Plus, the folks at PhotoShelter are very active in the photo­graphic community via their Twitter account and blog together with many free tuto­rials and ebooks. They even have a very inno­v­ative feature by which blog templates by Graph Paper Press can be imported into PhotoShelter to create the look of their site.

photodeck_040810.png

In the end it was PhotoDeck that was the perfect fit for me. There are many simi­lar­ities between PhotoShelter and PhotoDeck and for many it will be a toss-up. PhotoDeck does not offer printing fulfillment, as does PhotoShelter, which is OK for me as I prefer to print my own work on the paper stocks of my choice.

I partic­u­larly liked PhotoDeck’s method of setting up purchasing choices for your clients as you have an almost limitless ability to add options such as print size, print finish, paper stock, matting, framing and so on. Each of those options is available as a user-editable list and each has a price multi­plier. Combining those allows a virtual unlimited ability to customize exactly what you’re offering and at what price. Or if you want, you can set up numerous right managed and royalty free arrangements.

PhotoDeck Component Style Editor

Click For Full Size

Editing the look of your PhotoDeck site is conve­nient and easy. You can start with a number of pre-built themes and customize from there. Instead of hand editing HTML and/or CSS (which does you you tremendous power for good or evil), you just click on the screen item to be customized and select from a number of drop-down menu options. Very slick. And if you want to really start from scratch, there’s a rich editor (a visual HTML editor) that you can create whole pages in.

The killer feature for me is PhotoDeck’s ability to export your site design as a WordPress theme! Talk about a perfect mesh between sites. The theme required only slight CSS and HTML tweaking to make it match my blog perfectly. Take a look at my Photodeck site and click the blog menu item at the top to see for yourself.

As a bonus, as I was working to layout and arrange my site, I had a few ques­tions and contacted their tech­nical support. I got answers back within the hour from the site’s creator, J-F Maion, himself. Nice!

Oh, and one more thing. PhotoDeck charges nothing for handling your sales – no commission at all.

Use the checkout code YF@UVFAMJ for a 10% discount for you and an extra month of service for me.

The Logo

2 Oct
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Filed Under: Business

The New Logo

I’m pretty pleased with the work done by The Logo Company for my logo, stationery and web header design. They were easy to work with and delivered concepts and revi­sions in just a few days after each review and revision step. I described how I chose them in my post So I Need A Logo…

So why a design firm for this work? I guess the simple answer is that I can take photographs, and create code for a web site, but I’m just no good at graphic design. And I wanted some­thing more profes­sional looking than the old web banner header and my simple Moo mini-cards.

Logo Signature and Watermark

The final design files are a combi­nation of ready for print EPS, JPG and TIFF files along with editable Adobe Illustrator files. The editable files were important to me because I wanted to be able to handle simple updates, like phone numbers or email addresses, myself. I also wanted to create a modified version of my logo for use as a “signature” on printed images and as a watermark for my images if I upload them to Flickr or other less-than-secure sites.

Now I have a logo and the rest of a “real” identity package. You’ll be seeing more of it!

So I Needed A Logo…

20 Sep
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Filed Under: Business

I figured it was about time for me to get a little more profes­sional with my presen­tation and move up from my self designed stationery and website header to a real design by a real graphic designer. I knew there were companies out there that did logo and “corporate image” packages, so it was off to Google and I quickly had a number of them to check out. Here are a few notes, in no particular order, about the ones I reviewed, in case you may be looking for a logo design service, too.

My objective was to find a group that could do a package of designs: 1) A logo design with a reasonable number of revi­sions, since I’m not really sure just exactly what I want the logo to look like. 2) A stationery design (including letterhead, envelope and business card) that will be based on the logo design. 3) A static website banner header to replace what you see above incor­po­rating the logo and the stationery color scheme. I want it all to come together into a consistent look that will identify my “brand.”

Logo Design Guru — rather than a design firm, this is a crowd sourced design hub. You post the price you’re willing to pay (there are minimums) and what you want designed and many free­lance designers will send you their concepts. The one you choose gets paid and the site collects some listing fees from you. The recom­mended minimum for a logo is $149, for a stationery package is $99 and for the banner design $150, adding up to $398, plus fees of about $87.

Wicked Cool Studios — perhaps the name should have given me a clue, but I thought this team might be a bit to “hip” for my needs; I’m not a young man any more. They have an engaging web site and their work looks quite good, but I don’t think I’m their kind of customer. Their package price was $275 for the logo, $35 for the stationery, and $75 for the header, making a total of $385. I had to ask for that package price, as it was not a usual one for them, and I got an answer back within a few hours on a Sunday night.

The Logo Company — with a fun and infor­mative website, this company gave you all the infor­mation you might want about their services, right down to the file formats offered for the completed work. I asked via email about the static website header as an adder to one of their other packages and I got an email and a call the next morning. Their pricing is $149 for the logo, $50 more for the stationery, and $100 for the header making the package $299. They also have printing services for your completed designs.

Logo Genie — another profes­sional looking company with an impressive port­folio. Their package of a logo and stationery is $339, but I couldn’t find the price of the header.

The Logo Loft — these guys looked orga­nized and profes­sional with an infor­mative website. Their port­folio of past designs is very nice. The least expensive logo design package allowing for multiple revi­sions is $239; a stationery set is $139 and the website header is $100 (as best I could tell) which totaled $578. They also offered printing services.

Logo DesignWorks — an excellent port­folio high­lights their front page and there’s plenty of good infor­mation behind that. Package pricing was a little hard to figure out for what I was looking for; I sent an email asking for a quote and haven’t heard back from them (but its only been 24 hours, I guess The Logo Company and Wicked Cool Studios spoiled me). As best I could figure the logo and stationery would cost $297 (but that includes 500 printed business cards); I didn’t see a way to price the website header.

So after all that, I selected The Logo Company. They sent me a design inquiry right after the phone call with some basic ques­tions about what I needed, the style I thought I wanted and a little about me. Since I was stuck in an airport at the time, I filled that out and got it back to them. They’re working now and said they’d have their initial logo design concepts to me a just a couple of days. When I’m done and have the design in hand, I’ll post an update about how it all went.

Who Is Bob Rockefeller?

I’m a pho­tog­ra­pher and a Macintosh user who shoots what catches my eye and tries to remember David duChemin’s credo: “Gear is Good. Vision is Better.” I also dabble in HTML, CSS and WordPress coding. [Read More …]

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