Building or redesigning your photography portfolio website is an important milestone. However, most of us are not web gurus. Furthermore, to deliver a rich media and interactive user experience requires extensive knowledge of Adobe Flash. Hiring a professional web/Flash designer or company may exceed your budget. Learning to create your own Flash site and maintaining it could be a tremendous challenge. Commercial photographer should focus on the core of their art and business, not the technical challenges that tie down daily operations. If the above describes your current business predicament, how do you strike a balance between quality, creative freedom, and budget with your Flash photography portfolio website project?

Love for Adobe Flash: Its Brief History and Origin

In January 1993, a small company (a crew of six) named FutureWave started to create a graphic software package called SmartSketch; it was designed to allow users to draw on screen on Pen computers. After the termination of its original targeted platform: Go OS, FutureWave ported SmartSketch to run on Windows and Apple based computers. SmartSketch was introduced at SIGGRAPH 1995. Many attendees provided feedback, "Wouldn’t it be great if SmartSketch could deliver animation over the web?"

Taking the industry feedback to heart, FutureWave renamed SmartSketch to FutureSplash Animator, and the design focus shifted to achieve its web animation capabilities. After turning down an offer from Fractal Design, and a failed pitch to Adobe (ironic), FutureSplash Animator was published independently by FutureWave in May, 1996.

In August 1996, FutureSplash Animator quickly made a splash. Both MSN and Disney adopted its technology; there were simply no other products that matched its web animation, and interactive capabilities. With enough exposure and buzz, Macromedia realized FutureSplash’s potential, and purchased FutureWave in December 1996. Macromedia contracted "Future" and "Splash" from its original name, and released Flash 1.0. The interactive and graphic design industries were changed forever.

In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion. Macromedia Flash was soon re-branded as Adobe Flash. A 2007 survey concluded Adobe’s Flash Player was installed on over 96% of Internet-enabled desktop computers.

Discovering BluDomain: An Online Flash Photography Website Solution

The love-affair between professional photographers and Flash soon blossomed over the years. With so many digital artists favoring this medium, a surge of market demand surfaced. Wouldn’t it be great to present your rich photography portfolio in this format over the web; but how?

BluDomain is an online Flash Website Template Hosting service which does just that. It garnered much of the photography industry support and adoption as a standard solution to dynamically create, host, and maintain a Flash photography portfolio website. From procuring your domain, to managing your booking/calendar, and even basic e-commerce capabilities, beginners will appreciate the ease of use and speed in creating a new web site. For the avid users who like to read documentation, and watch how-to videos, they will also value the depth the BluDomain client administration portal which provides further customization of their Flash website.

Create a BluDomain Flash Photography Site in 24 Hours in 10 Steps

To summarize a typical basic BluDomain Flash site creation process, the following key operations are conducted within the client administrative portal:

1. Determine the right package and pricing – A typical BluDomain Flash site template costs from $100 to $400. This is a one-time setup fee. After you have chosen your desired template, you may opt to host the site yourself, or let BluDomain host it for you. Here are some key notes about the hosting options:
   
   

   • Hosting yourself - You get the benefits of flexibility and control over server space and administration. This means you will have to deal with technical maintenance and backup. This option is recommended for the savvy users.

   • BluDomain hosting - BluDomain will take care of all your domain name transfer needs. You will receive unlimited email boxes, unlimited bandwidth, and a standard 3GB of server space. Your work is also securely backed up by BluDomain every day. The cost is $100 annually.

2. Order your BluDomain Flash site - From ordering to processing, setting up a typical BluDomain website takes between 24 to 48 business hours.

3. Receive your administration login - You will shortly receive your web enabled account administration login information. All of your site design, customization, and support occurs from your portal.

4. Manage and update your splash page and home page – You may define image, cropping, opening window properties, resizing, and a home page slideshow.

5. Edit your main and feature Galleries – Define gallery names, titles, descriptions, upload pictures (2 MB per image limit), and design Gallery theme songs. – Define gallery names, titles, descriptions, upload pictures (2 MB per image limit), and design Gallery theme songs.

6. Upload photos and videos - Your picture uploads (2 MB per image limit) are only limited by your server space. BluDomain provides unlimited bandwidth, and 3GB of server space, with options to expand. Certain Flash website templates also provide video upload capabilities. The standard video upload format is 500 x 280 pixels.

7. Submit your business logo – Upload or update your corporate logo.

8. Define your navigation menu configuration – Define home slideshow visibility; create definitions for External Links and Single/Multi Page text sections. In addition, you may toggle the following sections: – Define home slideshow visibility; create definitions for External Links, and Single/Multi Page text sections. In addition, you may toggle the following sections: Proofing, Featured Gallery, Calendar/Schedule, and Contact Us.

9. Create and maintain your online calendar – Provide greeting messages, Titles, and submit button names. Add new events with name, message, and date specifications. You may also manage all current events, and adjust their visibility.

10. Publish your Flash photography website – Your website updates are reflected in real time.

More Advanced BluDomain Features

1. Website color adjustments – You may define your own custom colors to virtually any aspect of the Flash site including backgrounds, frames, buttons, accents, contact text, jukebox text, logo main colors, logo accent colors, copyright, and menus.

2. Define your music – You may turn your Jukebox on or off, define music when your website loads, random playlist selection, set song repeat rules, and upload your own MP3s.

3. Image display settings – Adjust frame reshaping speed, slideshow interval, slideshow auto start, and thumbnail image rollover behavior.

4. Copyright & watermarks – You may define your copyright line and link site-wide. Although not a common feature, you may globally apply watermarks to all your images. Watermarks could be created via text, or by uploading your own watermarked images. A watermark's position may be adjusted to the top, middle, or bottom of your photographs.

And… What about Flash Site Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

More commercial photographers are becoming more aware of the benefits of SEO. In short, SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of incoming traffic to a website from natural (or “organic”) web searches. As of date, Flash is still not an ideal medium to be indexed properly by the search engines, mainly because it's a running program, as search engines today are designed to handle static content.

Although there are professional SEO techniques to improve Flash’s ability to be indexed by search engines, such a technical topic is out-of-scope for this article. BluDomain offers basic Flash site SEO practices to a certain extent:

Edit Meta tags – Although you don’t have the flexibility of adjusting Meta tags individually for each image or page of your website, BluDomain does allow you to specify your primary Meta tags for the entire Flash site which includes: site title, site description, and site keywords.

Embed statistics tracking codes – You may also include your own website statistics tracking codes via the administration portal.

HTML conversion – BluDomain currently offers two HTML conversion compatible websites, which duplicates the Flash site content. The HTML codes are much more compatible with older browsers, and provide much wider support for search engine indexing.

>> Continue (Page 2): BluDomain Co-Founder Interview

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