Website

[Chip Thome]

Originally Posted by Chris Davis

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.

[Chris Davis]

Originally Posted by Chris Bryan

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.

Originally Posted by Chip Thome

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.

[Corey Graham]

Originally Posted by Chris Davis

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.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Chris Davis

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! 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

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Dror Levi

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! 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
Alice Barker Media - Portfolios - Alice Barker Media