website

I have been quoted £700 plus £20 a month service charge for a photo club website. Our club cannot possibly afford this. How do other clubs manage, please?

I use Zenfolio as an individual (see link in my info.) This allows various security levels including Zenfolio login, plus you get unlimited uploads of images up to 12mb. Might not work for a group, but something you could consider as its 10% of the cost! I'm very happy with it.

Cheers

Tony

My son Michael and myself run four websites on around £150 per year. These are:

www.johnrileyphotography.co.uk
www.rileyuk.org
www.adapsuk.org
www.michaelriley.org.uk

The last of the three is half used for the forum only, the rest being hosted by a member's own IT company. The main three mentioned are designed by ourselves using Concrete5 and others and are a doddle to update.

If that's the sort of thing that could be OK for you, PM me and we'll let you have more detail.

It really depends what sort of functionality you are hoping for. £700 + £20 a month isn't bad if it includes a customised template design, photo hosting and galleries, a forum, and your hosting and bandwidth charges.

On the other hand if you aren't too worried about branding etc, you could do it for free by simply setting up a Flickr group where members could post their photos and have discussions.

.. yep. I administer another forum and we pay just under €50 a month for a complete server with lots of bandwidth.

Bret

Our website, now used for our photos, only costs us about €70 a year, plus €8 for the domain name. Not much use to you in the UK but have a look around at what hosting sites are offering. Maybe someone in your club can do the homepage for you?
We use jalbum to make the photo albums then load them onto our site.
My husband made the home page himself.

Not much use to you in the UK I know, but have a look around at what hosting sites are offering. Maybe someone in your club can do the homepage for you? Or a friend of a friend? Every other person seems to have done web design nowadays .

Have a look at Clikpic, they charge from £35 per year.

Arden Photo Group have just started using them for their website.

Photium, run by a really helpful guy called Will. ABout £7 per month for the basic package and no set up fees.link

Another vote for Photium, just moved my site from Clikpic, much more professional, more options and if you've a problem, Will's always available, he's even replied on Sundays.

Another Photium user here
Will is extremely helpful and very knowledgeable!
Matt

Does Photium handle sites with multiple users?

Also Thoramay, without knowing what sort of bandwidth you're going to be using it's hard to estimate costs. As Brett has already pointed out, forums are notoriously demanding and a busy one will usually require a dedicated server costing a minimum of £50 per month. For a low volume forum you might get away with shared hosting in the £10/month range, but you could be shut down at any time if the hosting company thinks your forum is overusing shared resources.

Photo hosting will cause similar problems, as the volume grows you are going to be charged more and more for storage and bandwidth.

Our €70 a year site used to host a website with a pretty active forum. We closed it down though eventually. We didn't want to lose the domain name, so decided to use it for our photos instead.

What is needed is a web site to enable anyone in our area to log in and see just what our club is about, details of meetings, times, programmes and competition results. There are five other photo clubs here that do have a web site and obviously our club will miss out on potential new members. I have only recently become involved in the running of the club and need to ask a lot of questions. Just shattered to discovered how expensive the web sites are. We have no computer buffs in the club to explore this avenue. Grateful for the replies, but still not sure how to go forward. thoramay.

I use http://www.comwebhosting.co.uk/

£38.99 per year, unlimited bandwidth unlimited pop email boxes unlimited webhosting.

Fast response to problems & they also allow easy wordpress use.

http://wordpress.org/

Very easy with wordpress to update yourself, add calendar functions, lots of gallery options.

comwebhosting.co.uk also have in built forums which are also really easy to set up.

My site is hosted on their & uses a wordpress template www.garystafford.co.uk

... TBH, I think a forum and Wiki and gallery is all you need. Even if you're not a "nerd" (and I use that word very carefully), it shouldn't take that much effort. There are lots of solutions out there. I know we don't use half the bandwidth we could, but we have around 13k users, of which 1k are active and the only issue is diskspace.

Bret