I am looking to replace my website that does not look that bed www.nostalgicframes.com.
This website is a flash base and takes some time for it to load a movies.
I even had potential clients that complained about it.
I would love to have a website that the main page is my video gallery from vimeo.
I have tried word press with tubepress and it does not work (technically) .As well that it is a blog base and not a website base. More then that I am not the guy to program word press and change the layout.
Any suggestion for a friendly user website that I will be able to create a video gallery from vimeo movies since the vimeo widget does not cut it for me.

Press75.com|Exceptional WordPress Themes (http://www.press75.com/)

Press75.com|Exceptional WordPress Themes (http://www.press75.com/)

I'd agree that it's highly advantageous to stick with WordPress. A common misconception is that it's only for blogs. In my "real" job, I design and develop tons of WordPress sites, almost none of which look/function like a blog.

Thank you Chip.
that's what I was looking for.

You might also want to check out ThemeForest (http://www.themeforest.net)

Cory's right Dror, Wordpress is a content management system. What content you select for it to manage is up to you.

I just finished customizing a prebuilt theme for my brother's company's website. My website creation skills I would rate at novice. So it took a bit to get my feet wet and then change the look and feel to what we wanted from the original Wordpress theme that we bought.

The prebuilt themes do all the "heavy lifting" and what I did was really nothing more than "tweaking" it.

This is his site now:

SavingsPath Inc. | Spend Management Solutions (http://www.savingspathinc.com/)

This was the theme we bought and began with:

Minimal Theme | Just another WordPress weblog (http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/Minimal/)

Chip,

That's a nice job you did for your brother's site. I like WordPress. You get a lot for the little it costs, and there is so much help online for it. Finding a good theme that could be customized was the key for me.

I was real surprised at the help section Elegant Themes offers it's subscribers. There are a number of advisers who seem to take turns at answering the questions people toss up there. I must say I found the answers to half of my questions, already asked and answered in their forums.

I put it up on a server I had an account with and just played around until I got it right. Because it was on a subdomain, it didn't really matter how long it took. When we were ready for "prime time" it was kill the sub domain and then load the site on his server.

Being a novice at web design skills it was fun to see the "tweaks" take shape. That also was an incentive to continue on, tweaking my fool head off. :-) I made the alterations on my desktop and then uploaded the pages/files to see the results. When I was all done tweaking I had the entire site in a folder on my desktop so all that had to be done was upload it to his server. It did appear I could have "tweaked" files on the server, but figured out real quick if it didn't work so good, I was kinda screwed. :-)

I built one site for myself and another for a friend using Dreamweaver before this. Both took about a zillion hours and didn't look anywhere near as polished. When I do another for myself, it most likely will be another Wordpress themed site.

This is an interesting conversation. I used a BluDomain template for my website for videography and now since it is Flash-Based it won't play on iPhones or iPads. I also can't send direct links to specific pages of the site. My parents are wedding photographers and they used Big Black Bag, but get charged something like $40/month.

What are the advantages of WordPress over BluDomain or BigBlackBag? Do you have to set up your own hosting? What kind of cost would I be looking at? Thanks!

Hello Chris,

I just use inexpensive Yahoo small business web hosting, and about a year ago they added support for WordPress for free. I had been using Yahoo's free web creation software, but WordPress is much better. I set up the domain name for my site with Yahoo when I started my business in the summer of 2009, so the domain was already in place for WordPress. I log onto my Yahoo business account, and go to the tab for WordPress.

As you probably surmised, I don't know a whole lot about creating web sites. My own site is the first I've ever done, and it came out okay for me just dinkin' around. Of course, I have been reading a little, even picked up an old version of WordPress for Dummies at a garage sale.

Hope some real expert might chime in who can help you more. One thing I will add, is that it is EASY to embed videos on a WordPress site.

I'll take a whack at explaining this.

The site your parents have is a whole pre-conceived and built packsge, most likely, that includes hosting, design and maybe even domain name. Those are real slick to get someone up fast and still give them a polished and professional look. They are also very good for someone who doesn't want to have much to do with their site, other than field the responses from it. I have a photog buddy who uses a similar set up and he is very happy with his, and also doesn't want to try and build one out either.

If you bought a "template" for your site, that is akin to getting a "theme" to use with Wordpress. Both require hosting on a server in order to be seen on the net.

Adobe Flash is animation software that converts the imagery you see into basically a video file that needs a player in order to view. Because Apple is pushing it's H.264, they had decided to exclude Flash technology from the apps that run on their devices. So the easiest way to describe a Flash site is it's a bunch of video clips.

Wordpress is a content management system. It originally was designed to be blog software and needed to "manage" all the blog entries and comments/postings. So when you install Wordpress on a hosting account, at the heart of Wordpress is a MySQL database to hold and catalog all the "content" that you read or view on the site.

A Wordpress "theme" is just the look, layout and navigation. What you see and read, is the "content". Wordpress is the "meat" behind all this that glues it all together and let's you access whatever you want.

On a scale of ease to get up and running, what you and your parents already have is the easiest. That is assuming your "template" comes with hosting etc.

The next going down the scale of ease would be a Wordpress theme and Wordpress, or HTML pre-packaged site on a hosting account you set up independently.

The least easy of the pile is starting from scratch and building everything yourself.

WordPress = Vegas Movie Studio
Making your own website = "Uncle Bob" wedding video.

Are you a professional business? Then quit messing around with this stuff and pay a professional to create an effective website for you.

I just think it's funny how we'll all bash the DIY video producers, yet follow that exact same pattern of behavior with the first and potentially most important point of contact with new clients.

Last time I checked a decent Website designer will run you around $100/hour and then good luck updating any of the text or God forbid uploading videos on your own afterwords. No you'll have to pay the website designer another $100/ hour to do that for you. No thanks!

Well I found something that I like and cost me $39.00
Premium WordPress Themes | Elegant Themes (http://www.elegantthemes.com/)

That's the group my brother picked and by now I am sure you can use any or all of the themes on any websites you own. I have to admit the guys are real nice in the support area and sure seem to know their stuff. As you start out and have questions, start with the search first.

WordPress = Vegas Movie Studio
Making your own website = "Uncle Bob" wedding video.

Are you a professional business? Then quit messing around with this stuff and pay a professional to create an effective website for you.

I just think it's funny how we'll all bash the DIY video producers, yet follow that exact same pattern of behavior with the first and potentially most important point of contact with new clients.

Chris if you use Firefox take a look at the page info for DVInfo and you will see it uses vBulletin 3.8.5. vBulletin is a canned application anyone can buy for just under $200. Allegory Design took vBulletin and "tweaked" it, just like I took Wordpress and used that for my brother's site. How many people on this board know that, or more important, how many even care? DVInfo has a polished look to it that no one finds offensive. But reality is, everyone of us comes here for the content.

I never knew about DVInfo until my buddy Chris Harding was talking about it a couple years back. As I look across my bookmarks toolbar I can see that out of 28 of my regularly visited bookmarks, well over half I initially went to because of a referral from someone else. IMO the days of thinking one's website is the "be all to end all" first point of contact are over and gone. A website is in the chain, but no where near being the "king" any longer.

The website I replaced for my brother was one he had the "professionals" do. He's never said what he paid for it, but eluded to around $3000 some years back. My brother is very skiddy about what he puts his company name on to. Had his site come out looking like crap it would have been canned and he would have gone the "web professional" route in a heartbeat. He sells to CFOs, COOs and CEOs as well. That's the traffic he expects to visit his site, not someone off of Google. He doesn't know anything about site design, hosting or Wordpress. All he knows is he now has another nice polished looking site that is updated and looks to be technologically current.

Last time I checked a decent Website designer will run you around $100/hour and then good luck updating any of the text or God forbid uploading videos on your own afterwords. No you'll have to pay the website designer another $100/ hour to do that for you. No thanks!

Replace "website" with "wedding video" and "designer" with "videographer" and there's no difference. BTW, you need to shop around a little better for a web developer. If you need the ability to update your own site with videos, then make that a requirement of the project. Don't just grab the first one out of the yellow pages and assume they're all equivalent.

Chris if you use Firefox take a look at the page info for DVInfo and you will see it uses vBulletin 3.8.5. vBulletin is a canned application anyone can buy for just under $200 .... But reality is, everyone of us comes here for the content.

Bingo. DVInfo is all about the content and the community. A typical videographer website is not.

I'm not saying WordPress/vBulletin/etc. are not good frameworks. They are. I own a web design company with five employees and we attend WordPress conferences regularly. A fair amount of the websites we create start with WordPress.

But just because you've downloaded WordPress and a theme does not mean you're going to end up with an effective website.

Sony Movie Studio is also fine software. Does that mean that anyone who knows how to use the software will produce a wedding video equivalent to Glen Elliott, Susanto Widjaja or Jason Magbanua? Heck no!

My point is not that you can't make a good website. We're all creative professionals here, I'm sure with enough time most here could. However, you're going to burn lots and lots of hours that could probably be used for more productive activities (like shooting or editing?) If you find you have a lot of downtime, go ahead (honestly, if you have that much downtime, I'd start examining your business model...)

My real point is that we scoff at the "Uncle Bob" videos yet have no qualms with producing our own "Uncle Bob" websites.

Replace "website" with "wedding video" and "designer" with "videographer" and there's no difference. BTW, you need to shop around a little better for a web developer.

Exactly! You beat me to the post. I make far more per hour as a web designer/developer than as a video guy.

My real point is that we scoff at the "Uncle Bob" videos yet have no qualms with producing our own "Uncle Bob" websites.There seem to be an awful lot of videographers with "Uncle Bob" websites.

We use Joomla! (http://www.joomla.org) which is a more full featured CMS than WordPress although you can seamlessly embed WordPress within a Joomla site to get the best of both worlds as in our most recent site which is almost finished Wedding Films & Photography - Alice Barker Weddings (http://www.alicebarkerweddings.com)

Any suggestion for a friendly user website that I will be able to create a video gallery from vimeo movies since the vimeo widget does not cut it for me.Here are a couple of sites that we created using the Joomla! (http://www.joomla.org) CMS & specifically the "AllMedia Vimeo Feed Gallery module for Joomla 1.5" to take a video gallery from Vimeo & display it as thumbnails on the website.

Video Appeal (http://www.barkers.fr/video-packages)
Alice Barker Media - Portfolios - Alice Barker Media (http://www.alicebarkermedia.com/portfolios/alice-barker-media)