 So I've had my own photography website for the past nine years, and over that time I've used WordPress, Squarespace, and Smugmug. And in this video I'm going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each and which ones you should choose. Now like most things, the choice won't be the same for everybody. It really depends on your goals. So I think it makes sense for me to start off with what my goals are from my photography website. And that is to make money selling licenses and prints from my website. So my website really is a way to make a passive income off the photos that I've already taken. Now to be clear, you can use Squarespace, WordPress, or Smugmug to sell your photos online and they all work. So it's not about whether it can do it, it's about which ones right for you. Now there's certain features that I want to be able to sell on my photos online and here's my list. If you're watching this video, I assume that you're either thinking about setting up a photography website or you've already set one up and you're thinking about changing platforms. In which case, I recommend that you create a list of everything you want on your site. These sites all have so many features available to them that when you start evaluating them, it's really easy to get lost. So it's good to have a list of exactly what you want your site to do before you start looking at the different platforms just to keep you focused as you're going through and trying to choose which one you want. Now to start, I'm quickly going to go through exactly what I mean by these features and maybe talk about why they're important to me. I'll do this by just walking you through my website, souvenirpixels.com and if you want to check it out for yourself, I'll put a link down in the description below. So first, the large photos in a feed. So I like to have a page. I like to do my home page that basically shows all the photos that I've uploaded recently and I like people to be able to click into those photos and see a large version of the photo. So I think let's go with this one here. I think this just really shows when it fills up the screen, you can see a high resolution version. I think people are much more likely to buy so they can kind of see exactly what they're getting. OK, so that's the first thing to be able to see these high resolution photos. The next is to be able to buy a photo. So you can see here when you open up and look at the photo, there's a buy photo button. And from here, people can then go in and purchase this photo so they can purchase a download, a paper, print or wall art. And there's other things you can set up here depending on what you like. But personally, I find these and sell the best. I kind of limit the items, the ones that sell. OK, also within the downloads here, I have personal licenses and commercial licenses. And I like to be able to have different versions of the full license. So if someone just wants to buy it for the web or for Facebook or something, they can spend a little bit of money and buy it. But if they want to buy a large version for print, then it costs more. OK, so this is something that I look for being able to have pricing versions as well. Now, if I go out of this, I also like to have the portfolio here so somebody can go through if they want it. They're just getting used to seeing my photos. They want to see some of my best photos or what I think are my best photos. They can go and look at the portfolio. So I can set this up here. This is also the second most viewed page on my website after the main page. So I think the portfolio page is very important. Next is the photos by location. So for me, I do a lot of travel and landscape photography. And what I found over the years is that people want to be able to browse my photos by location. Someone might see a photo of mine from, let's say, Quebec. And they may think that I like that photo, but I want a different location in Quebec. I like that style. So then what they'll do is they'll come to my website and want to just see the photos of Quebec. So that's how I've organized them here. The next thing I want to have is a bit is a contact page. So I want a way for people to be able to come in and contact me, send me a message, ask me questions about my photography. The next thing that I really need is an RSS feed. And this helps me set up my daily photo email. So what I have here is people come to their email address and then when I upload a photo to the website, they'll receive it. I need an RSS feed for that. The last thing that I really need here is to have it mobile friendly. Now, one of the things that I think is important for mobile friendly is when someone comes from a mobile site, it should be easy to use. So if I go take a look at this here, one of the things that I've set up is I've actually set up a special Instagram page. So if someone comes and looks at this from Instagram, I've got a page that looks very similar to my Instagram feed with the square crops. But the only thing different is that what they can do here is they can actually go in and purchase the photo. And this looks great on a mobile device. So this is really important to me as well. So those are the different things that I'm really looking for that are key features that I think I need on my website to be able to sell my photos effectively. So it's totally possible to set up WordPress Squarespace or Smugmug to do exactly what I just showed you. So when you're evaluating these platforms, it's not really about whether it can do it or not. It's about how flexible design is and how easy it is to set up and maintain. So before I get into the details of the evaluation, one thing I should mention is there's really two different versions of WordPress. One of them is the hosted version on WordPress.com, where you basically sign up and start using your site. Another way to use WordPress is to go to a hosting provider, set up a site and then install WordPress on there. If you're just starting out, I strongly recommend you start with WordPress.com if you decide to go that route, because it's much easier to set up and maintain. And when I go through and talk about the evaluation today, I'm really comparing it to the WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPress. So here's a comparison of how I found using these three sites to sell my photos online. Three stars being the best and one star being not so good. The first main difference you're going to see here is in the flexibility design. So WordPress has a lot more templates out there. I think it's a lot more configurable than the other two platforms with Squarespace being second and Smugmug being third. But with all that flexibility and configurability comes complexity. So it kind of goes the opposite way, whereas because WordPress is so flexible, it also makes it a bit more complex to set up. Whereas Smugmug may not be as flexible when it comes to configuring the site, but it's much easier to set up. So the big thing that makes Smugmug so much easier to set up and maintain is the way that it handles products. So Smugmug, the feed and the sales are really integrated. So when you upload a photo to your feed, it's easy to set it up to be automatically available for sale. Now, that's only because it's set up for photographers and set up for sales. It makes it that easy. Whereas with WordPress and Squarespace, they're more general sites. So it takes more work to set those up. So for example, if you want to sell a photo license on Squarespace, what you need to do is you can upload your post first, then you actually need to go in and set up a product to sell the license as well. So whereas it takes a couple seconds to set up a photo for sale on Smugmug, it can take five or 10 minutes to set it up on Squarespace or WordPress. And that's really the big difference between the two. So take a look at what I mean. This is my process for uploading photos to Smugmug. Now, I'm going to show you how I do it through photo lieu, which is the way that I upload my photos. But it works the same way if you upload them directly to Smugmug. Normally, I upload my photo to all the sites at once. But for this demo, I'll just upload it to Smugmug to simplify it. I add in my title, description, choose my keywords. Then the photo goes to Smugmug and check this out immediately. It's available for sale and it is in my location collections as well. I have Smugmug set up to do all of this for me automatically. You can't easily do that with Squarespace and WordPress. All right, now let's check out pricing for the three. Now, all of these sites have a monthly pricing and a yearly price. I'm just going to use the monthly price for comparison. But you could obviously go with the yearly price, which gives you a bit of a discount over the monthly price. So WordPress is $59 for the commerce version. Now, you may be able to get away with the $33 business version and then use a plugin to sell your photos. But that'll be more work to set up. For Squarespace, you need the products feature to be able to sell your photos online. So the cheapest version that you can get that with is $18 a month. Last for Smugmug, to be able to sell your photos online, you need the portfolio version, which is going to cost you about twenty four dollars a month. So none of these are exactly cheap. But I make more money selling my photos online through the website than I pay in the yearly costs. So I kind of think of it as an investment to kind of make more money passively from my photos. So currently I use Smugmug for my website, but let me talk a little bit about the transition between the three different sites. So when I first started uploading my photos online, I was on WordPress and I would just upload the photos there, but I wasn't selling them. But I had a lot of people contacting me to purchase licenses for my photos. So what I would do is I would go to PayPal and I would create a PayPal invoice and then send it to them. And then those people could then use a credit card to buy the license. And that's how I solved my website. But it was a lot of work and it was very reactive. And if I was on vacation, didn't have access to a computer, I could miss out on a sale because I wasn't able to send that person an invoice. So what I did was I looked into upgrading my WordPress itself in there and looked too expensive and complicated. So I decided to switch my site over to Squarespace. And then I ran it on Squarespace for a while. So every time I uploaded a photo, I would do a post on my blog, which is like a photo blog. And I'd also go in and I'd create a product on Squarespace for the license for that photo and that worked well for a while. But I upload multiple photos a week and every time it was five or ten minutes to be able to go in and create the blog post and create the product. And after a while, I just got busy and I just stopped doing it. It was just it was not in this work. I didn't like doing it. And my blog got stale and it's waited for someone to contact me before I went and created the product. So I just found that I wasn't maintaining it as much as I as I thought I would. And that's when I decided to move over to Smug Mug. Because in Smug Mug, I was really able to streamline the process. As you saw, just upload it and then everything there is available for sale already. Now, Smug Mug works great for me and I'm really happy with it. But it might not be for everybody. If you understand website design and you like it and you would like to go through and customize your site a lot, you might be better off and more happy working on a site like WordPress. Also, and this is a big one, if you want to have a written blog, you may be better going with Squarespace because Squarespace has a really good blogging module that you can just go set up and start blogging. Now, when I was using Squarespace, I did have a blog for a while and it did drive more search traffic to my site. But again, I found I didn't keep up with it. I wasn't that interested in blogging. And so it got stale. So I don't currently have a written blog, but if you do have a written blog, that's something that's not available on Smug Mugs. You may want to consider looking at Squarespace as a way to host your photography website. Now, there are a couple of other things that I really like about Smug Mugs that I found when I was setting up my site over there. And these aren't key for me. I could probably live without them, but they're pretty cool that it has them. The first one is the gallery map. So I GPS coordinate all of my photos because they're travel photos. So what I can do is I can add this map to a gallery. So people, when they log in, they can see exactly where I took the photos and what photos I took nearby there, which I think is pretty cool. Now, another thing that I really like is that you can set up a different page with a different layout for the same photo feed. So what I've used this for is I've gone through and I've created a page for Instagram that's really mobile friendly and it kind of looks like an Instagram feed and I've used that as the link from my Instagram. So when someone's on a mobile device, like an Instagram and they click on the link, they go to a page that also looks like Instagram with a similar type of feed and they can go and purchase a photo from there, which I think is pretty nice. Lastly, the photo organization is smug mug is so much better than it is in WordPress or Squarespace. Now, this isn't a huge deal for me, because I'm just not only posting one photo a day to my feed, but it is nice to have it there and to be able to go through and easily organize all your photos. So that's another nice thing that you'll find in smug mug that you won't see in some of the other tools. Now, the great thing is all of these tools have free trials. So if this gives you a better idea of what you want, you've got a list of the features, I'd recommend going in and signing up for a free trial and just trying them out. I'll put a link in the description that you can use to basically go through and sign up for free trials from all of these sites. All right. Now, if you found this video useful, really appreciate it if you go down and do a like and do a subscribe. It just kind of lets me know the time I put in to do these videos is worthwhile. Also, if you decide to go a smug mug and you want to see how I've configured it to do my website like everything I just showed you, I'm going to create a video on that and upload it next week. And I'll put a link to that up here. Best of luck selling your photos online.