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.

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.

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.