As a forever-at-the-amateur-level photographer, I generally hate looking at the work of professional photographers. The photo pros make me realize how really good they are. Of course the Intertoobz is loaded with the work of my people, but where can the pros go do display and actually monetize their pics? NYC-based PhotoShelter may be the right answer for them.
In a similar genre to Webydo and other instant website generator services, PhotoShelter lets some of the older analog-based–and there are more than a few out there—as well as the digitally-oriented but non-Web savvy pros quickly set up a practical website of their portfolio.
PhotoShelter gives you a set of templates, along with some customization capabilities. You can instantly publish your site under the PhotoShelter domain (for $9.99/month) or pay extra for your own domain ($29.99). The pics are copyright protected with watermarks and there are other image quality and security options available. You’ll also have a dashboard view of SEO analytics to give you some marketing insights.
And most importantly for the pros, a PhotoShelter site has built-in e-commerce capabilities. You can set both individual rates for pics, or also bundle a bunch into a package.
For an example of what can be done, check out their website. In my own experimenting, it took me only about 45 minutes to set up a primitive PhotoShelter site based on some pics I took during a trip to place called Paris. Has anyone ever photographed that city? 😉
The e-commerce capabilities alone give PhotoShelter a powerful value prop. And starting at $29.99 you get HTML5 support with their Beam platform. Essentially, your portfolio will look better across different browser and devices.