StockaPhoto.com redesign

ecobo · #1 (**permalink**) 07-09-2008, 02:18 PM

Hi all!
It's a longtime since I've been here.
So, I have redesigned my website High Resolution Stock Photos, High Quality Stock Photography. I've made significant changes to the code, making the URLs search engine friendly.
The site is based on a script from ktools.net, but I have modified it completely to suit my needs...
What do you think. What else can I improve?

davebarnes · #2 (**permalink**) 07-09-2008, 05:23 PM

As someone who buys stock photos every week, I think your prices are high when compared with iStockPhoto.com, dreamstime.com and sxc.hu

ecobo · #3 (**permalink**) 07-09-2008, 07:53 PM

Hi Dave!
Yes, the prices are higher, but the quality is higher too

And I don't enforce my clients to make a subscription or buy credits. You can buy as low as one photo and pay only for that photo...
And as someone who also buys photos from iStockphoto and Dreamstime, I can say that the quality of my photos is significantly higher. Of coarse, this is visible at large prints only. But if you think my prices are high, what do you say about the prices of Corbis, Getty, Alamy etc.

So, your suggestion for improvement is to lower the prices

I may do this, but I am thinking also about raising them to $150 - this was suggested by a client, who buys, as he said: "the same quality" from Alamy at ~$300

davebarnes · #4 (**permalink**) 07-09-2008, 11:34 PM

My clients won't pay for the quality of photos that Creatas and Getty sell.
My clients want photos for their websites (I don't do print) for $5-$10 USD.

ecobo · #5 (**permalink**) 07-10-2008, 05:07 PM

I sell images for prints. Large prints, magazines, brochures, billboards... That's why the prices are high.

I don't remember who has said this, but I love it:
"Cheap photos aren't good and good photos aren't cheap..."

If you want some photos for free, check my other website High resolution royalty free stock photos, graphic design, free photos, web design - the photos are good for web projects, but low in quality for prints.

thorfjalar · #6 (**permalink**) 07-11-2008, 06:33 PM

What about allowing free use of all your pictures to blogs and others that would agree to only use the images online and not on print, a small size digital resolution with a link to your site?

Could viral your images online to those possibly interested in paying for use on print resulting in more sales possibly?

Many of your images are so good they should be spraypainted on a large canvas and sold in galleries for big bucks, just sayint that their use electronically and online would further and not hinder their purchase for on-print use I wonder in light of open source and all that.

Image I especially liked:

Stock Photo of Rain, Road and Sunset

ViableDesign · #7 (**permalink**) 07-11-2008, 07:18 PM

Hi there! I think your site looks really nice, very clean and well-organized. And you have some very beautiful pictures, indeed!

I'm wondering, though, why you have that nice CSS file and are still using your table-based layout; there's some overlapping, it appears, with your CSS and inline styles, also--your body background color, for example. These issues bloat your files and cause slower page downloads, I'd think, and on top of the large-resolution images you're storing, it could be difficult for some people.

Your website doesn't validate with the W3C ([Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.stockaphoto.com/ - W3C Markup Validator). There is no doctype at all, and there were 62 other errors.

I would be concerned about your form captcha, also. How would people who are color-blind use it?

Thanks for letting me analyze your site.

Jo

marcusjking · #8 (**permalink**) 07-12-2008, 03:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thorfjalar

What about allowing free use of all your pictures to blogs and others that would agree to only use the images online and not on print, a small size digital resolution with a link to your site?

Could viral your images online to those possibly interested in paying for use on print resulting in more sales possibly?

Personally as someone who works in the magazine industry as a designer we wouldn't use a picture that had already been plastered around the internet on blogs etc apart from maybe on a news item. The image would have lost it's impact if it has already been seen.

Cheers

amxfan · #9 (**permalink**) 07-12-2008, 09:53 PM

Not being in to the printing side of things myself, I would have to agree with Dave on this one. Why do you not open yourself up to the web site market by running your images through a batch to lower the size resolution to 72 or 100 dpi? This would, I'm guessing, bring in more sales without any overhead cost. You could also have set it to sell by license per site if you had the back end to track it.

Other than that
On your product detail page, the add to cart button is too high and the line above it goes thought it. Also please remember I'm not into printing and I do not mean to offend anyone here, but looking through your site I personally got the feeling that I was looking at a photographer selling his high resolution images from his vacations. The images in the fashion, model area made me think that since they all were of the same person "all but one", that this person was either your daughter or a friend. I also felt that the selection of images was limited and did not cover all categories such as cars/ trucks, heavy equipment, moons/stars, eyes/legs etc, etc.

Lastly I noticed that your home button links to stockaphoto.com/index.php . You should change this to stockaphoto.com/ to prevent any duplicate content issues.

ecobo · #10 (**permalink**) 07-13-2008, 06:26 PM

Hey, thanks all for having a look

ViableDesign, I nave purchased the script this way - with tables instead of CSS. I don't really know how to transform tables into CSS and I think the site is very complex to complete redesigning. I have made only some tune-up regarding the look, some features and the SEO.
Thanks for noting about the doctype also... I don't have validated the code, but cleaned-up lots of unused tags and duplicates.

amxfan, I am thinking about selling lower resolution images, but the process to upload and set pricing for all the 1000+ photos is very time-consumptive... I've tried with some of the images and I think it may take more than a week to complete this... This is an example: Stock Photo of European roe deer And yes, some of the categories are still empty, I have many images to upload, but having to work on some other (very well paid

) projects, I have not enough time for the photos..

Thanks for noting the other issues also.