Personal and Pro Sites

[Craig Ridley]

I know this question has been asked before but I am unable to find the answer through my searches.

What have people done in terms of pro and personal sites? Do people setup two sites or do you just password protect you personal galleries?

Any advice / recommendations would be much appreciated as I want to only show my best images for the pro site but also have family and friends with ready access to all my more general images.

Thanks!

[Allen]

I know this question has been asked before but I am unable to find the answer through my searches.

What have people done in terms of pro and personal sites? Do people setup two sites or do you just password protect you personal galleries?

Any advice / recommendations would be much appreciated as I want to only show my best images for the pro site but also have family and friends with ready access to all my more general images.

Thanks!
Have you seen this thread (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=116352)?

[Craig Ridley]

Have you seen this thread (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=116352)?

Thanks Allen - I will take a more detailed look this evening. Certainly looks to be one very good approach, but I am lso interested in any other approaches that people have taken (to make an informed decision).

[jfriend]

Thanks Allen - I will take a more detailed look this evening. Certainly looks to be one very good approach, but I am lso interested in any other approaches that people have taken (to make an informed decision). I took a different approach. Though I am not a pro, I ended up with three different types of photos and audiences and I wasn't all that interested in sharing the others with each audience. My three constituencies were:

Family Photos
Community photography (school, sports teams, sporting events, city functions, etc...). These are typically shared with those that attended the event.
Scout photography. Hosting photos taken by a number of photographers for a local scout troop.For the scout troop, Smugmug donated a lifetime free account because they are a non-profit. That one was solved.

For the other two, I debated how to split my personal site up, but all the techniques came with significant tradeoffs. In the end, I decided that the annual fee for a second account wasn't really that big a deal and it was soooo much easier to manage with none of the drawbacks that sharing a single account among the two constituencies would have. Costs more, works better, easier to manage. One option to consider.

[anonymouscuban]

Allen really helped me out with my site, which is the thread he references in his post.

My dilemma was that both my wife and I use the account. She takes tons and tons of snapshots and uploads every single one because she uses the account as an offline backup as well. I have gotten more serious about photography over the last year and I really like sharing my photos. The problem was that when you visit our site, you were overwhelmed by the 12K+ snapshots!! I didn't want to have to maintain two sites so I posted for some help. Allen answered the call.

I just got done customizing it. What Allen helped me do is separate the pictures by Recent Pictures (my shots:wink) and Archived Pictures (my wife's snapshots:wink). I didn't want to just create a bunch of categories and sub-categories because that would just further convolute things. I also wanted to keep certain stuff from direct public view.

So now, if you click the Recent Pictures button on the nav bar, your taken to a set of categories with fresh pictures. Then, if you select the Archived Pictures, you are asked for a password and then taken to an HTML only page that looks just like my Gallery Category page. You can then select to go to subs by theme where you will find photos of that type grouped by year. So it's like have two sites in one... you don't lose any levels of categorization. Once you do the initial setup, it seems very easy to manage.

I separated by recent and old pictures but you can use whatever subject or types that you want. And I can see where if I wanted to have three or four different "sites", I could easily do so using the same steps.

Thanks again Allen,

Alex :rofl