I found foliolink, they have lot of template options and there was one that was nearly perfect for me. I went with them a month ago. You can just use the templates off the shelf and tweak the the XML code if you want to.

I got into the code which I knew nothing about and in 10 days my site was up and it looks almost exactly how I wanted for a very low price. The code is difficult at first, but once you learn a little about how it works, it’s very easy. I went with the Nairobi II template.

The result. My agents, my clients and potential clients and friends love it. The response has been overwhelming.

I imagine, I’ll get tired of how it looks and change to a different template and it will look new to me and to people who view my work. We live in a world where change is normal. Also in this business change is an expectation.

Some examples of websites using the Juicyorange Portfolio template include the following:
http://www.ewanburns.com
http://www.jasonlewisfurniture.com
http://www.iamrandyharris.com

A greeting.

To recover some of the investment I am re-selling my own website for a low price.

See for yourself here:

flashphotoportfolio.com

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Add Nadine Brown of Brand Envy/Lost-Luggage to your list.

She redid my site and is part of the team that branded the new Geographic Assignment division site/portfolios.

http://www.brandenvy.com
http://www.lost-luggage.com

I am very pleased with the designs and update she proposed for me plus bringing everything up to date and away from the dreaded Trajan.

Good person to work with.

I have been contemplating several of the sites suggested here for my website portfolio, but was wondering if Flash will be practically obsolete in a couple years. The reason is that Microsoft Silverlight is supposed to replace Flash. One of my close friends is a web designer and he practically always uses Silverlight rather than Flash. What do you all think? I really love Flash but I’m thinking Silverlight might be better. The links about Silverlight are below if you are unfamiliar with it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Thank you for your feedback everyone,
Brett

If you like flash to display images and galleries, I think the best option for flash templates is to “wrap” them within a robust content manager like WordPress. I do that frequently for my clients and their search ranking and traffic increases dramatically. Now matter how well someone works to “optimize” flash it never provides good results SEO compared to non-flash solutions. And yet the flash galleries are very appealing. So the best option is to combine both and replace the typical flash splash page and info pages with a blogsite.

Thanks again for a great post,
-Marc
http://www.ProPhotoBlogsite.com

To contribute to the discussion: we choose to work with Flash galleries for http://viewbook.com, because it makes it very easy to embed your work in to any website (flash is easier to embed than html), even a custom website. People are very creative with this, see those websites for example:

http://wojtekgil.com
http://www.meireles.com/work/web.html
http://www.surivansornsen.com/webs/modeling.htm

Our portfolio pages are basic. The aim is to use them more as a ‘tool’; you can use it as your portfolio website, or when you’re working on a new website as a temporary solution, or to show selections of your work beside your website:

http://engelfoto.viewbook.com/
http://gabrielerosso.viewbook.com/

It is also possible to link to the individual galleries directly, to show a selection of your work to a potential client, or gallery:

http://engelfoto.viewbook.com/valley_of_fires_2006
(Great red filter photography by the way)

–Rien.

As a photo editor of multiple magazines, I look at photographers’ web sites every day. My pet peeves are intro movies, music, user-unfriendly navigation, not updating sites literally for years, photos that take seemingly forever to load, and not listing your geographical location. I’m constantly assigning shoots around the country, and I need to know where you are! To that end, I often look for photographers on PDN’s PhotoServe and ASMP’s Find a Photographer portals but pursue it only if there’s a web site listed. And on any site, I obviously have to see examples of the type of work I need to assign.

On the Flickr issue, if you want to use it in addition to your own web site, fine, but I wouldn’t have it as your primary site. Professionals need to have a more distinctive presence.

When you promote yourself, go to the effort to find out what type of photography a company uses so you aren’t sending fashion promos or web links to photo editors who assign only editorial portraits, for example. Your promo should include your web link, and be sure it’s active. If I like the promo, I’ll look up the web site and bookmark it.

Good luck!

Your comments are appreciated!

Thank you,

Lar

There are many misconceptions here and I would like to clear up and offer my 2 cents…

First off Google is working very hard to identify Search Engine Optimization techniques for working with flash. If your flash site is dynamic a sitemap or robots follow line of code in your HTML tag and an additional file in your sites domain root will allow a search engine to gather all of the XML code you are likely using as a translation file to your images or database to be crawled. For search engines currently they are not crawling your flash ‘content’. This is HUGE and any photographer worth their salt need to understand this, evaluate solutions, and have a plan for getting around this issue. If you ever want to be on top of Google, which I promise you do, it is imperative that you identify what type of search you want to be found and pursue this. You will never be on top of Photography, but I bet with a solid plan and some patience it is relatively easy to be found on top for a search on say ‘Yellowstone Photographer’…

Secondly if you are having image scaling issues or want to severely improve your workflow to the web, look at using Slide Show Pro with Director. It is fast provides on the fly images resizing and compression that is IMHO excellent quality at about 60 bucks US. The front end can be heavily customized or left as it is. It provides a workflow that employs a standard flash component which you can make look and behave however you would like and allows you to interface right from spotlight and soon to be aperture.

Finally, if you don’t understand the web, HIRE SOMEONE WHO DOES! Whether your using a template, CMS blog such as Text Pattern, Flash, or HTML/JS (people can have JS turned off) a web developer will be able to give you the most bang out of whatever you would like to use.

There are many more issues that have not been addressed above and I can only assume that is because you’re not even aware that they are issues. The main reason to use Flash in a portfolio is two fold. It is on 98% of all computers world wide, and what your portfolio looks like on your browser is exactly how it will look on all other browsers through out the world and on cell phones. Having said that, keep it simple stupid KISS!

At the top of the comments there is a gross misunderstanding of the flash player.

Flash supports several different file formats. When a JPG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, AI, PDF, ETC is displayed in the Flash Player…IT IS DISPLAYED IN THE ORIGINAL IMAGES NATIVE FORMAT. It is not recompressed unless there is a command or action to change scale, resolution, ETC. In these cases vector art will receive no detrimental effect, however lossy formats such as JPG will indeed be subject to another round of compression.

Flash is a client side player, much the same as Java and is not a compression or file type platform. A Flash SWF is a compiled flash file that can contain and support any number of different file types.

I hope that helps in some way,

Jake