Website Advice Please.

[DaydreamJay]

Hi forum.

I am a keen photographer and I have sold a fair bit of my work in a small shop that I have. It is mostly local scenes and there seems to be a reasonable amount of interest in the stuff that I do. I would like to start selling online and need some help please. I want to create a website that I can sell my photos on that gives options of sizes, mount colours, frames etc. But also I want other photographers to be able to sell their work on the same site by creating an account. This will be all local photography of my area and there does seem to be a demand for it judging by the interest so far. I have a wide format printer so what I want to do is receive orders for myself and also for the other photographers, print them out and deliver them and then send the photographer his commission. The registered photographers would need to be able to log in to check if any of their items had been sold.

I am sure that there must be very many sites that already do something similar to this so I was wondering if there were any free or low cost templates that would help me out. If it's more than what a low cost template can provide what can I get away with paying a designer/ company to do it for me? I wouldn't need any graphical work doing, just the skeleton of the site.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Jay.

[JohnHallett]

Hi - I looked into something similar for a friend of mine who has a poster printing business and, after considered investigation, we decided not to bother. Unless you are very skilled as a web-site designer/producer I think it is way above an amateurs capabilities and then there are legal requirements that you need to take into account with regards to holding & selling other photographers copyrighted material, model / property releases, etc, etc. However, if you are determined I guess the best advice is to have meetings with two or three web-site designers so that they can give you some insight as to what hardware/software is required and how much it is all going to cost. The business decision as to whether it is all going to be worth it is then yours alone