Scoobyphotos.com | Blog

Hosting

• If you haven't already registered a domain name and taken out hosting, try to plan the growth of your site, and calculate how many visitors you are likely to recieve. Photo websites are bandwidth hungry, so you need to ensure your site is hosted with a comapny that offers a good transfer amount per month, or who are willing to charge you a reasonable rate for exceeding your allowance. What you don;t want to happen is for your site to be taken down by your hosting company mid way through the month because you have reached your band width limit. There are a few tricks to reducing your bandwidth usage, such as making sure your photographs are optimised for the web, and possibly hosting some of your content on another server.

  
  

Domain Name

• You have probably already come up with a catchy domain name, thats sure to bring in hundreds of visitors. Be sure that you consider any legal implications to a domain name before you register it however, some companies do not like enthusiasts websites to use their trademarks and will happily involve lawyers should they feel your domain is infinging on their copyright. Whatever domain name you choose, ensure its relevant to your content, as this could be a key factor in getting your site ranked well on the search engines.

  
  

Site Organisation

• Plot out the structure of your site before you begin to do anything. This will save you alot of time if you can understand now how to organise your content into relevant folders. Make sure you give yourself enough scope for expansion in the future. What may at first appear to be overkill, will, in the future, be of benefit.

  
  

  For instance, if you were to run a site similar to scoobyphotos.com, you might start off by having a structure of folders that goes 'model' > 'colour' > 'photos'. This might be fine to start with, but then you get a photo of an import model, which you want to keep separate from the domestic models, so a structure of 'model' > 'colour' > 'origin' > 'photos' would make more sense. Try to have an understanding of the types of photographs you will be hosting to see how the structure is best organised.

  
  
  
  

Watermark your images

• At some point, one or more of your photographs will end up elsewhere on the web, so take precautions and watermark any images that you wish to protect before you upload them onto your site. You can ensure that files aren't hotlinked from your server, but there is nothing to stop somebody saving a photograph and rehosting it on their own server. On scoobyphotos.com, a number of the photographs are submitted by visitors to the site, so I do not put a watermark across the photo, instead putting a link at the bottom stating that the photograph is hosted be scoobyphotos.com. This ensures that if a photograph is hotlinked somewhere, people seeing that photo will know where it originated from.

  
  

Site Design

• There are a lot of resources out there to help you with designing your site, so I'm not going to attempt to give too much advice on this here. How you actually present your photographs is going to depend on the volume and frequency you are likely to update your site. If you are only going to update the site every once in a while, and the content is mainly personal photographs, you might be happy to use one of the many packages out there that create photo galleries.
  

  
  

  On the other hand, if you are likely to be adding more and more content to existing pages, having to rebuild the underlying html each time by manually adding entries becomes a painstaking and laborious task. In this scenario you want to automate the process as much as possible, using some form of scripting language such as .php or .asp which will allow you to dynamically create photo galleries. You don't neccessarily need to have a database sitting in the background, scoobyphotos.com doesn't, just being able to read a directory of images and build up the page using the filenames can be sufficient.
  

  
  

  When you actually come to design how the photographs are going to appear on the screen, understand what size photos you are going to have - if all the photos are different sizes, your site design is going to have to be able to deal with these differences and still present the photographs clearly and in keeping with the rest of the site design. If all the photographs are the same size, it becomes much easier to design your site because you know the exact dimensions required to present the content.
  

  
  

Site promotion

• So you've designed and built your website, you've added all your content, it all works and looks good. What next? The 'build it and they shall come' philosophy might be nice, and in a perfect world it would possibly work, but in reality, unless you find someway to promote your website, no one is going to know about it.

  
  

  The first thing to do to promote your site is to target the people most likely to be interested in your content - fellow likeminded individuals can be found right across the web, normally lurking in forums and bulletin boards. These are good stepping stones to getting your site noticed. Join up and introduce yourself, and let people know about the site. A signature at the bottom of your posts on forums is a good way for the site to be promoted without it being to obvious.

  
  

  If your site is of interest to readers of a particular magazine of newspaper, perhaps write an article for them, or suggest they might be interested in interviewing you (make sure you've got something interesting to say).
  

  
  

  At some point you will want to get your site ranked highly on search engines, as this can be a main driver of traffic to your site. Photograph sites have a tricky time getting ranked, normally because the site is dynamically presented, which can make it difficult for search engines to index, and photographs may speak a thousand words, but its words that help search engines rank your site. Try and add articles to your site that are relevant and interesting, and will help search engines get an idea of what your site is about. Also look at sites such as Digital-Point, WebMasterWorld and SEO Forum which have some good advice.
  

  
  

  Another way of getting your site noticed is to cross-promote on somebody else's website. If someone is running a site of a similar nature, drop the webmaster an email and see if they are interested in exchanging links. Not all webmasters will do this, but some do, so it might be worth trying. Make sure your email is polite and outlines exactly what you are proposing, otherwise your request may be ignored.