Hi Trish:
Sounds like you are starting at the very beginning. A website can fulfill two important functions. First, it creates a presence for you on the internet, or "worldwide web", as we used to call it. A site can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. If you don't already have a site, you should consider creating a basic site that demonstrates who you are, what you do, how to get in contact with you, and provides some information about your work. The second function is the ability to sell your work online, without you being physically present to do so.
If you don't already have a presence on the web, you'll want to think about what you want to say, and how you want to portray yourself and your business. I wrote a basic primer on how to start the process, on my blog, here: Web site construction 101.
For a very basic site, for free, try using Weebly (http://www.weebly.com.) It requires little or no programming knowledge, and gives you the opportunity to experiment with your pages. You can add simple gallery features to it, and for a small yearly fee, you can use your own domain name, and add ecommerce to it.
For more robust selling features, I'd suggest something simpler than zenfolio or photoshelter, which are two of the best, most professionally managed photo-centric website hosting companies. You can create a selling site with very little HTML knowledge using smugmug.com. SmugMug handles printing the images and shipping them, either to you, or to your customers. It will also let you create a couple of informational pages to tell your customers about your business. SmugMug will let your customers order prints, gallery wraps, metallic prints, and some promotional items like coffee mugs directly from the site, making it one of the easiest to manage selling tools. To set your own pricing, you do have to pay for the upgraded professional site.
I would suggest that you look at photographer's sites to get a feel for how they are set up. You'll start to notice a wide range of features and design elements as you get more familiar with how these sites are structured. Some use Flash for the galleries, which is very slick, but not accessible on all smartphones (like the iPhone and the iPad). Some are completely visual, and others use copy as well as pictures to tell the story. You can usually tell the commercial photography sites from the fine art sites, too, as the fine art sites will have a shop attached more often, while the commercial sites may only sell licensed images and not prints.
Keeping your offerings simple at first will help. Don't try to offer five different sizes in three finishes, with fourteen mat colors and six frame styles. Start with two sizes of prints and maybe a simple white mat. Try adding a larger gallery wrap.
It takes way more than a few hours to build a decent site. You can create a presence (read simple web page) quickly, but the learning process is not particularly fast. To determine your needs, map a site, create the copy, size and compress the photos, make the galleries and upload it will take you anywhere from 20 to 100 hours. Find some good resources online to help you with the tasks you don't understand. Take it slow, build your site in stages.
Jim Parker
parkerparker :: design | photography
http://www.parkerparker.info
@dakkid / twitter
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