Setting up web presence / pages
- This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 6 months ago by Ed.
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When I build, I find that the client / recipient likes to see photos of the process. So far, I’ve used Apple’s shared albums to do this because I can invite individuals to see the photos (access control), easily load photos, and add comments / captions. It isn’t adequate, though, because I cannot control the order in which photos are presented.
I’m thinking of setting up a web presence to facilitate sharing my work and am looking for suggestions for what to consider using. Any suggestions?
If it helps, I actually did software engineering for a bit until I got sick of it. I had zero patience for user interfaces and lacked the copious memory for dealing with huge swaths of application libraries (which is why I packed it in). My work was in C++ and python with a focus on system architecture for data analysis software and (heaven help me) release management. That was decades ago. I’m a weird mixture of technically savvy with computers, out of date, and a bumbling boob with UI.
You mentioned that you’re using Apple products, but if you have a toe in the Google ecosystem you can create sites for free, and even create different ones for each client/recipient. It’s been a while, but I used this for a small club-type thing years ago, and the site builder had various design templates and was flixible enough for our needs. Just go to sites.google.com while logged in to your Google account to play around with it. Obviously you won’t get a domain for free, but the URL to your sites once published won’t be terribly arcane, and it doesn’t really matter as long as you can email/text the URL to your client. Hope this helps!
LiquidWood- Thanks. This looks promising. I guess the cost for this equals whatever ends up being needed to pay for additional storage, if needed. I’d hoped to be able to control access, e.g., restrict viewing a project page to a limited set of users. Google pages allows this, but seems to only work for users with gmail accounts. I’d need to think about how important this requirement is.
As for storage … You get 15GB free, and the site didn’t use much storage. Each page was maybe 1K, and I’m sure you know you can store a whole lot of pics and vids in half a gig. You could even create different accounts to host the sites if you end up using too much.
As for access control … I ran their analytics on the site for a while out of curiosity, and nobody other than the friend group ever accessed it. I’d see a google crawler every now and then, but I saw no evidence it was indexed, probably because there were no meta tags. So basically you’d never find it unless you had the URL. Definitely not foolproof, but likely good enough for this sort of thing.
As for users needing google accounts … We had some sheets embedded in the site, and I do remember that (1) the sheet had to be shared, and (2) users had to be logged in to their google accounts to see them. But I think that was because they were sheets embedded from Drive. The pictures on the site didn’t have this limitation, even if I added them from Google Photos. It seems to replicate those to the site without restrictions. So your clients should be able to see all that with just the URL, without logging into a google account. You can test this by browsing from an incognito window.
Also just in case it wasn’t clear, you can publish multiple sites, each with its own URL for each client, so you’re not mixing pages for one client with another.
Sorry for the long-winded reply. Not trying to push it, just answering your concerns from my experience. It worked great for our purposes and you can’t beat free. 🙂
11 October 2022 at 3:02 pm #776611Ed,
Though not free of charge, Dropbox does offer some of the functionalities you mention.
∙ pictures can be ordered by file names (e.g. 01_xxxx.jpg appears before 02_xxxx.jpg) or by using a slide show)
∙ comments (but not captions) can be added
∙ sharing and access privileges can be set to various levels
∙ as owner one gets information on who is accessingThe various types of sharing can be made for both folders and individual files, be bi-directional, and using Dropbox’s built-in software or those specified by the owner, for editing.
The storage capacity (I think) is from around 1 TB to no limit, depending on the subscription, which allows for sharing videos; something I use to sway my customers that pecuniary compensation for the efforts would be welcome. This far both have been more resistant than W. Churchill towards paying his tailor.
- This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by Sven-Olof Jansson. Reason: editing of format
@SOJANSSON Thanks, Sven-Olof. This looks helpful. I’m thinking that I could do most things with Google pages, where it looks like layout is much easier, but then have a link from Google pages to Dropbox if I needed the access control.
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