How I built my Portfolio Website using FolioStop – Betty Bhandari
I have been a hobby photographer for many years. A little over a year ago I finally made the decision to get myself a website that represents my photography.
As I didn’t want to spend much money on my first website, I went on the lookout for companies that offer attractive templates and finally stumbled upon FolioStop. Out of all the companies I liked they were the only ones that offered a two week free trial period. As I assumed that web design and building your own website is difficult, I figured this way I could check out if I was at all capable of creating a website by myself or whether I needed to bribe a web designer friend into helping me.
Very soon after I started I had an almost finished website and I did it all by myself! This seemed a miracle to me who has as much knowledge of web design as my grandmother has of iTunes.
The secret is: FolioStop make their software dead easy to use. I will tell you the steps I took to build my website www.bettybhandari.com.
Once you have created your own account and have installed FolioEdit you can get started. FolioEdit is a simple bit of software which offers six basic elements from which to build your website: a text page, a multi-media page, an image gallery, a video gallery, an audio gallery and a folder.
The first step is simple: think about how you want to structure your website menu. The easier to navigate a website, the more successful it is. I wanted to have a ‘home’ page for general introduction, a page for each of the areas of my photography, a page for information such as services & costs and a section that tells the visitor a little more about me.
I started by dragging and dropping the above mentioned web elements into my menu area on the main FolioEdit window. I dragged an image gallery into this area and I double clicked its default name of ‘Untitled Image Gallery’ and renamed it to ‘Wedding Photography’ and hit save. I opened the gallery by double clicking the icon next to the name and dragged all my wedding images into it. If you want to show more than one wedding you simply use a folder instead of an image gallery, call this ‘Weddings’ and then add several image galleries into this folder, one for each wedding.
My Weddings Gallery
Next I dragged a multimedia page in to my menu, named it ‘About Me’ and wrote all relevant text in there. I also wanted a picture of me on the page so I simply clicked ‘Add image’ at the bottom of the multimedia page window and dragged the image in. I found that a landscape image looked better than a portrait image as it was the full width of the text.
My ‘About Me’ Page
Last but not least I created an image gallery as my ‘home’ page, loaded a single image into it and added all my contact details to this image. All of the image galleries offer you the option to add titles and text info to accompany the individual images.
My Home Page
Then I went into ‘Site Design’ and played around with the different layouts FolioEdit offers. Next I adjusted text styles, background and text colour by clicking my way through the software’s options in Site Design. The most difficult part was to create my hand written logo, but when ready I was able to load it into the software very easily.
When it came to fine tuning I contacted the boys at Foliostop’s customer service who were not only pretty helpful, but actually very proactive with additional suggestions such as “Why not add an ALL RIGHTS RESERVED note to your website. This is how you do it…..”. This is where the ‘Graphics’ tab comes in. You can upload images to the foreground, content area or background of your website. I made the text ALL RIGHTS RESERVED as an image using photoshop and then uploaded it as a foreground layer so that it appears on every page. I may also add a graphic for my facebook page which you will be able to click.
I have not only been very pleased with how easy and fast it is to get a good looking website, but the monthly maintenance of adding new photos, text, info and testimonials is dead easy. I always wanted a website that I can be in control off at any time of the day or night, without having to rely on someone else to update it for me. The FolioStop software and boys behind the system has helped me achieve this and I’m looking forward to discussing new features for the software with them in future.
Betty Bhandari
