Building my own Photography Site

A few weeks ago my SmugMug account expired and I didn’t bother to renew it. This is where my photography website, Sunpech Photography, used to be hosted. I wasn’t fully utilizing it to make sales nor was I pushing it very much to friends, family, and even clients. So I couldn’t justify spending any money on it when I’d rather make sales on 500px and 500px Art.

Surprisingly my account was discontinued almost immediately and I whipped up a decent site in less than 24 hours along with appropriate DNS changes just so I didn’t have an ugly 404 page.

Motivations #

Besides saving money I have other motivations to building my own site almost from scratch.

I felt I could build my own photography site the way I wanted it– for basically free. So in a matter of a few days I completed a lot of what I wanted using Ruby on Rails, Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Twitter Bootstrap, and Font Awesome. With TB the site is well equipped to be mobile and tablet friendly.

I’ve been promoting sales on 500px Art, but that may change in the future. With 500px going through some internal changes recently, I need to protect any SEO karma I’ve built. I want to be able to simply change the buy print link en masse rather than fixing them one by one– which I have to do for this blog.

New Website #

I’m happy to announce that I have launched it in it’s current state, which I deem ready for public consumption. I still have some features I want to add such as multi photo uploads, better social media linking, and client login. But at it’s current build it’s usable for my needs.

My renovated photography site: https://www.sunpechphotography.com