I'm the IT guy for our small business amongst my other hats as an owner. For sure, there's more to it than I'm going to portray especially for bigger business's and ones who host their own services like email and such. But honestly, it's not hard to figure out and not like blowing an engine if you fuck up the tune..... You just won't get email or have a Web site until you figure it out.

There's no reason you need to use the same company for everything.

Domain = godaddy for cheapness
Email = Google for robustness and spam elimination
Web site = pick one of hundreds of there for ease of use and applicable templates .

Like using this site.... Google is your friend and read, learn then ask.

Part of owning a small business is either doing it yourself or farming out the parts you either can't do yourself, on your "spare time", or you just plain "don't want to do it yourself".

Good luck!

On a related note. Anyone ever had to deal with an affidavit for their business? I may have to delve into that realm of things as well. Some of my least favorite things, tax law, economics and other legal mumbo jumbo. Comes with the territory of a business I suppose. Get used to it.

Thread Revival!

My wife has a photography small business. Like infant photography. Like bring your 9 day old baby to have ridiculous outfits put on and pictures taken.

She's at a point now where she needs a website.

So, what say you mt.net? Who should she use for a photography website? Smugmug and Zenpholio obviously cater to this market but the prices are....NG.

She needs to be able to host large amounts of photos (uhhhh...duh?) and make personal galleries for her clients. Built in cart shopping would be a plus.

Pretend like both of us are completely clueless in all things website design/hosting/publishing etc. Pretend like you are trying all of this to a nine year old...from 1998.

Thanks in advance for any advice. If you are really bored you can search for "Erin Wilwert Photography" on the Facebook to see what she's done so far...

Smugmug seems to be built around the photographer and the workflow of photography and the templates seem to offer a sense of "professionalism" that I would expect from someone I was to buy either a product or service from.

The higher end plan, while maybe expensive at first glance, also gives you a way to "upsell" the client and therefore providing more revenue easier (if that makes any sense).

You'd need to buy a domain, which you can do through GoDaddy or a number of others then assign it to your Smugmug account.

If it were me, and I was serious about making money from the venture, I'd invest the money as infrastructure and expense it out (she is going to form an LLC or something similar right?). Buy the annual plan and be done with it.

Just my 2 cents.

Good luck!

I know GoDaddy is ranked pretty high but I dumped them for Namecheap.

Interesting, I see they offer FreeDNS. Might need to find out if they can do that on a "port by port" basis I.E. only port xxx.xxx.xxx:1194 as an example.