centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
liveBooks :: Photographers Dream?
There are times when one encounters an idea so simple but elegant that you have to marvel at the person who envisioned it and saw it to completion. I’ve had such an encounter today with a site called Live-Books (thank you Sunny) that allows Photographers to make their own online portfolios in a sleek, feature rich website.
The site is simple – yet it captures what would be important to most photographers. It allows for very high quality image uploads, displays the images beautifully using flash, and according to the demo – has a very easy to use interface for managing portfolios.
It also appears to have password protected sections – an invaluable component for those photographers that want privacy on certain shoots. I couldn’t find this feature listed in their PDF, but I did see it in one of the featured sites. This is a great feature for photographers.
The price is a little steep – $4000 can get a very nice, custom website for most photographers. What it cannot get them is the back-end functionality that allows for such easy manipulation – this is where Live-Books really shines. The downside is that their sites look very similar, so don’t expect anything innovative (over the other Live Books).
All in all, I think this is a great service and it lends more truth to my theory that Flash will provide the next generation of web applications
28 Responses to “liveBooks :: Photographers Dream?”
Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
-
Imap Hosting…
Web page hosting is typically free, advertisement sponsored, or cheap. For e-commerce, SSL is also required. The image host will then store…
While the benefit of liveBooks is cleary its simplicity and elegance (mostly due to its simplicity), I wonder if they are setting their prices too high, based on what else is out there. With Flash website batch exporting from Photoshop CS2, easy to use (and free) photo sharing sites like Flickr.com, and other inexpensive helper apps like SlideshowPro.net (which can pull from an XML or RSS source), photographers — both amature and professional — are being offered more and more for less and less.
Consider this path: Batch export a folder of files from Photoshop, upload the folder to Flickr with their file upload program, add tags and organize in Flickr’s easy interface, then throw the automatically generated RSS feed into the custom configured SlideshowPro website, and you’ve done the whole process of liveBooks for $20 (the cost of SlideshowPro). Its true that it’s a little more complex of a process, but now your photos are a part of the Flickr community (greater exposure), and you’ve saved quite a bit of money (the only real development that’s needed is the creation of the website with the SlideshowPro template.
My biggest concern with these all-in-one sites has always been the question of expandablity. What if the photographer wants more than just a contact and bio page? What if they want a store? What if they want a blog? What if they want additional links? They are limited by the one thing that makes this web app so cool: its simplicity.
You make some great points (and I’m sure Live-Books has you on their banned list) about the alternative methods of doing things.
Perhaps Live-Books has found a niche for Photographers that do not have the time, know-how, or desire to learn the steps you outlined. You mentioned three different components that are not common-knowledge to the average photographer! And Photoshop isn’t cheap, hehe…
You’re right about expandability. I think many have to make a judgement call to see if its worth it. If you’re a photographer and you don’t have much to say (except for your pictures), then it might not be an issue.
Bottomline: People often pay for convenience…
Good comments – The Flickr / Slideshow combo is clever.
I belive you can actually add a store function to Live-Books as well as add on additional links (pages) as needed to your portfolio sections. their Lite version comes with 3 links in the portfolio section, and you can add as manyy as you like for a few hundred more. if you need more main links than a contact and about page, you are probably adding superfluous links to the navigation.
Plus, you forget that SlideshowPro offers much smaller images than Live books as well as removes much of the interactive experiencethat the Flash offers (thumbnails, etc). And by the time you add in the development costs (plus _time_) to get the actual site coded and running, you’re probably looking at a less than elegant solution compared to Live Books.
For those reasons, I can see how many photographers will be impressed by Live Books’ offerings, especially in their Lite range of products.
I was intrigued by liveBooks until I saw the price. I think it’s also very important to realize that you are tied to them for your hosting, and they don’t provide any information about what’s included in the $14.95/month hosting fees. I’d hate to spend $4000 and not be able to move my site to another host if it became necessary. What happens if they go out of business? For $4000 I would also want a site that has the potential to rank high in the search engines. I certainly don’t buy their claims that you can have “High Google ranking” simply by creating a site title, description and keywords. Without some bodytext and some linktext that can be searched and indexed, I wonder if their sites would rank very high at all.
As a creative consultant who loves Live- Books, I want you all to be aware that it is NOT $4,000.00 – the basic site is $950.00 and then you own it- yes, you pay a monthly fee but that is minimal. Another question you must ask yourself – how muh time have you lost waiting for your programmer to upload, design and load your site- this program puts you in charge and in the long run will save you not only thousands of dollars from having to go back to the designer or the money lost by not having your work out there!!!!
How can you “own” the site if you have to pay them the hosting fee indefinitely? You can’t move the site to your own server; the application won’t work. What actually do you “own” then? Do they give you the development files for the site? Doubtful. If they close up shop, you lose your site. if you fail to pay the hosting, you lose your site. I don’t see any way around those factors.
There are other solutions out there as well. The guys at PHOTOtool also build what they call the Total-Control-Site (www.total-control-site.com) that allows photographers to manage galleries, text, page layout, news, meta tags, page names… and because it isn’t all Flash, Google can crawl the site for updated info. That alone is powerful for my stock business.
I’ve found many of the negative comments regarding Live-Books on this site to be a bit misinformed.
As a satisfied Live-Books customer, I can say that anyone who has actually gone through the process of working with the people at Live-Books to build their website knows that each site can be customized, modified, expanded, and designed far beyond the basic version used to advertise their product. These sites are not limited in any way.
Live-Books was willing to work with me to push my site as far as I wanted in terms of look, extra features, etc. You pay an extra fee for these capabilities, but in the end you own your site outright. It beats working with a web designer and it ends up being far more cost effective. I ended up going with a fairly simple design, but it’s great to know I can add features at any point as I want them.
As far as ease of use in managing the site, it could not be more user friendly and intuitive. I can log on and rearrange my portfolios in a matter of minutes.
For a working photographer, Live-Books is a dream come true.
Check them out.
Kurt Iswarienko
I’m glad to see some discussion of liveBooks and wish to introduce myself. My name is Matt Bailey, VP of Sales at liveBooks, Inc. At liveBooks our primary objective is to achieve a simple system that empowers the photographer to manage the content of their website and display their images in the most professional manner possible. Our clients have found that their sites are equally effective whether being shown on Madison Ave or by the small town wedding photographer.
There are a few points made above that I feel need addressing in the interest of maintaining accuracy. There were several references made to a $4000 price tag. I want to clarify the fact that we offer several different packages at different price points starting at $950 and topping out at $3900 for our highest-end package; our most popular package runs $1900. There was also an entry stating that we don’t provide information on the features included with our hosting package. The following is an excerpt from our hosting brochure (available on request):
Web Hosting: Very Secure, Very Fast: $14.99/mo (this price is about to drop, please contact liveBooks for details).
Web hosting: Your liveBooks webSite will be hosted on our dedicated severs which have been built from the ground up by us to optimize your web
site’s performance. The servers are connected to the internet by a Multi-Homed OC-3 and Gig-E Backbone connections. Our servers are mirrored,
load balanced, and automatically backed up every day.
Disk Space and Traffic:
• 500 MB Disk (Images on your liveBooks site average 90K, so this is plenty)
• 15 Gigabytes Transfer (no client has ever gone over)
• 24-hour FTP access
• Webalizer site traffic statistics
E-mail:
• 15 addresses @ yourdomain
• 15 POP/IMAP accounts
• Browser-accessible Webmail
• Unlimited aliases and forwarding
• FTP access for posting web galleries
Another point was made regarding liveBooks hosting policy: “I’d hate to spend $4000 and not be able to move my site to another host if it became necessary. What happens if they go out of business?” It is true that we host liveBooks websites. We have tried very hard to find a way to let our clients host the site on whatever server they want without compromising the speed at which the images load, and the creative control of the editSuite. However, due to the latest technologies liveBooks utilizes to serve up such big images so fast, and the nature of live, dynamic editSuite, the sites must be hosted on state of the art dedicated server. Until the typical host updates the quality of the servers they use, we will need to host the sites. As for going out of business, currently we are the leaders in the field with clients like Magnum Photos, Stanford University, the Fraenkel Gallery, and hundreds of successful individual photographers and agencies betting on the stability of our company and our product. We have recently received great reviews in over 5 industry magazines, including PDN, Digital Photo Pro, and Shutterbug. What’s more, to accommodate our expanding business, we have recently moved to a new 5000 sq ft office in San Francisco. We invite you all to come by for a visit if you are in the neighborhood.
Finally, on the subject of Google search-ability: a search for any of our clients by name will yield impressive search results. In addition, searches by specialty may also result in high ratings. For example, a search for “digital food photographer” brings up our client Francisco Tonelli on the first page: Results 1 – 10 of about 10,300,000 for digital food photographer. The reason our sites are searchable even though they are flash-based is that each site has a ghost html version of all content, including individual image metadata, that is invisible to web browsers but is shown when your site is being indexed by a search engine. In our next release, all the images will be individually indexed with google by IPTC content.
For more information, please contact me at matt@live-books.com.
I still don’t see how it is possible to own the site. There is no way for them to give you the site, along with their CMS application for use on your own servers. The line about other hosting services not being fast enough is a poor excuse. The fact is, if they give you the CMS, they don’t have a product to sell anymore. Anyone could duplicate the application for use on any server and livebooks would be out of business. The CMS usage is what they are selling, not the design! If they don’t give you the CMS application, then you can’t edit your site without editing the actual Flash. And I highly doubt they would give you the development files for the Flash either.
So really, what is it that you “own outright”?
I just thought I would weigh in here and offer my opinion of the livebooks product from the perspective of someone has who has worked with the people at livebooks and used the product for about a year now. I’m a busy professional photographer specializing in portrait assignments for magazines and advertising agencies and I’ve had a web presence for the past 8 years or so. I’ve worked with web designers and programmers on every site before I found livebooks and I always felt that to be the weak link in the chain of the portfolio website system. A key element of a photographers website is the continual updating and adding of new pics and in the past this was always a time consuming job. On the last version of my site, a flash site, I even had the programmers set it up so that I could do my own updating without going in to learning flash but even though this made the process somewhat self-serve it still required a number of steps and some complex naming and uploading. I was in discussion with a design agency here in Los Angeles about building me a complete drag-and-drop back end on a flash front end website when I discovered livebooks. In fact, the site I was trying to build for myself they had already built.
The livebooks site may seem like a big investment upfront but in reality this is the most cost effective solution that I have ever discovered for a working photographer. The site is stunning to look at, loads incredibly quickly and is effortless to update. I’ll even have my rep on the phone and we’ll edit new sequences together while I’m uploading and arranging and she is simply refreshing her browser.
Beyond the technical and aesthetic qualities of the site, the people at livebooks are great to work with. Additions and changes are easily accommodated and often done same day. There aren’t really any limitations as far as design elements go (although I opted for a very simple site to really highlight the photography) and some of the added features such as password protected client areas and the ability to produce PDF’s of the portfolios are really useful. Most importantly – I am constantly getting complements from clients and a lot of other photographers about my site. I strongly recommend that you take a serious look at livebooks if you are serious about the business of photography.
I think live books is a complete rip-off. try exporting a flash gallery from light room beta for free!!
Another option is fluid galleries where you own the creation software not to mention your site for a fraction of the cost.
I love the idea of live books….it is just wayyyyyyyy over-priced for what it is.
I have to echo Bryce’s comments. I have been a live-books client for 2 months now and couldn’t be more satisfied. I looked at every other available alternative for a site and concluded that going with live-books was a no-brainer. When you take into account the whole package- design, instant loading of pages, ease and speed of editing, and the the people at live-books it is a very good value. Not the least expensive-but definitely the best value out there in my opinion. Live-books is an elegant solution and well worth the price. I wish I could be as satisfied with my recent medium-format back purchase.
Hello,
I, today, had a very good photographer sign up to our site that was using this livebooks system. In researching their website I found this thread. Now I have been programming for a very long time (1985), and began building our fashion tv photographer and model site from the ground up without being aware of the other offers. I also have a degree in photography so being able to quickly deal with my albums was part of what attracted me to developing what I now see is very similar to livebooks. I added the community element though, ability to upload RAW files, and the ability to allow your fans to subscribe to your paid albums via SMS or credit card. I had set my pricing at 9.99 to 19.99 (depending on hdd space) per month including the whole auto-generated flash, email album to client, and hosting of your domain name with the email. etc etc. There is no start up fee. The problem is…I spend so much time programming I don’t have very much time to promote, so I consider myself lucky to have found this thread, although we do have around 5000 model and photographer members.
If any of you shoot with a brand other than Canon and can send me a RAW file for testing purposes I would be very appreciative. The site will also convert video files to flash, as we always look for content of photo shoots for our channel, which has 300 million viewers. Any comments are welcome, you can send them to info at ftvstudio.com, or that RAW file…
Visit Site Thanks! Duncan
I have an Evrium Fluid Galleries 2 Website, and a close photographer friend of mine has a live-books website. In terms of a gallery website, I think the Fluid Galleries website is actually more versatile then the Live-books website.
I had my Fluid Galleries software installed on my own server free of charge by Evrium, the next day after purchase. I can easily create and delete my galleries at will, where as with Live-books this process would cost me time and a few hundred bucks for each gallery. I don’t pay any monthly fees, and I saved a HUGE amount of cash on my original purchase.
I can customize the look and layout of my Fluid Galleries website from the administration panel, on my own, using the layout and customization tools included in the software. An important note is that you can change the layout of your website… yes, change where the menus are located, change where your logo is located, change the website background, etc. Fluid Galleries websites can all look different using the same software, where Live-books websites all look the same.
All of the changes to the website, I do on my own, without the need of an outside company. This seems to be the true purpose of the Fluid Galleries Website; to liberate the photographer from depending on any outside companies.
The only difference I keep hearing from photographers is how Live-books is a marketing tool… That’s only because they’ve written there website marketing jargon in that manner! If you take a closer look at the Evrium software features and the Live-books marketing blurbs, they talk about the exact same things.
Having just written”Creating the Breakthrough Portfolio” I have spent the last few years researching portfolios good and bad. I have found that LiveBooks to be one of the best investements for a photographer, desugner, stylist etc. In fact anyone needing to show a portfolio to get work. This comes from interviews with art buyers and other people who make decisions to buy work. What makes Livebooks such a deal is that they spend the money to innovate and refine the technology to make a wondeful product, a product that has challenged and changed the what the market expects in an online portfolio. They spend time to insure that their clients have sme of the best technology supporting them. That leaves us photographers more time to go after business and make pictures> They are a good partner. The flexibility of the product leave it to the photographer to create a unique vision. This product is worth every penny.
Wow Ken, how much did they pay you for that? Nice endorsement. Seems you made another one over at macForums, too. Livebooks must be an amazing product to get you to search Google for livebooks discussions and sign up as a new forum member just to post how great they are.
Without demeaning live-books, there are other more cost effective options out there. I am an amateur photographer and there ain’t no way I can spend $4000 or even $1000 + $15/month on a website that I may or may not keep tomorrow. I’ve had enough experience with gym memberships, thank you very much. :)
I personally happened to choose Zhibit. They offer quite a reasonable website for under $10/month with no upfront fees. They’re template based so customization is limited but it was more than sufficient for my needs. It’s fast and clean and I get to edit my own website whenever I want. The site is HTML so I was concerned about my copyright, however they did a pretty good job protecting it and more importantly to me was the fact that HTML is better for search engines. Hey, if you Google my name, my site comes first! Worth a peek if you’re looking for a quick website.
Check out my private site at zhibit.org/yaniv . Comments are always welcome!
“For example, a search for “digital food photographer” brings up our client Francisco Tonelli on the first page: Results 1 – 10 of about 10,300,000 for digital food photographer.” says Matt Bailey (above).
Well, I just did a search for that. Didn’t see Tonelli anywhere in the results. But I did come across his site after a little plugging. Um, it’s not even a Livebooks site as far as I can tell: http://www.francescotonelli.com
??
You should check out how much more you can get at SiteWelder for substantially less investment. Our customers are some of the best in the business. Not only do we offer flash presentations of your portfolio, the site is built in HTML so that you will not suffer the search engine penalties associated with 1 page flash site like LiveBooks.
You can also completely build you site at SiteWelder and mess with it for 30 days before deciding whether you want to sign up, although most folks who try a demo sign up in considerably less time.
Good luck with your site, and we’d love to see you give SiteWelder a test drive.
Regards,
Mason
The SiteWelder Team
You can check out my personal site by clicking on my name.
I thought I’d chime in as a commercial photographer who signed up with Livebooks two months ago. I bought into the “lite” version, which is less than $3000, and have three portfolios posted.
I found the company to be very well run – helpful, easy to find a live person with grey matter to talk to, and the software very intuitive and easy to use.
I also found the template customizable and the in-house designers easy to work with and turned around the design in a matter of days, not weeks.
In addition, even though it’s a flash site, it has been very google-friendly, as you can add tags and keywords easily and there’s a “mirrored” text site that goes along with it.
I would definitely recommend checking it out. You can see the site at http://www.davidshopper.com/
Well I agree, I am an agent for photographers, makeup, hair & stylists, & I am at http://www.pressbook.com which is amazing, they are always coming up with new tools and really help. At the moment there are over 4500 sites & 20000 members. they do have advertising on the site but if you want, you can pay 150 euros for the year & you get no ads & as a bonus you can use the data base of art directors etc (1500 mails for free). Check it out, it is free to register & add as many images as you want, it takes about 15 minutes,there are more than 3000 professionals visiting & 50000 page views every workday & 6000000 images seen every month. Really can’t be beat..
I’d like to comment on the recent posts regarding liveBooks’ SEO solution. For the record, back in 2005 when I sited francescotonelli.com as an example of search results achieved with liveBooks, Francesco was a liveBooks client. Since that time, he has joined an agency which required all their photographers to use a pre-determined website format. On leaving, he expressed regret and stated that he had nothing but good things to say about liveBooks.
A more current example of a client achieving great search results with liveBooks is Brad Mangin with Sports Illustrated. A Google search for “Sports Photographer” brings up 4,990,000 results…at the time of this post, http://www.manginphotography.com comes up #3.
As far as the implication that Google somehow penalizes those using flash, I’d like to direct you to an excerpt from an article, published on Google’s webiste::
“Does Google index sites that use Macromedia Flash? Yes, Google indexes pages that use Macromedia Flash… If you’re concerned that Flash content on your pages may be inhibiting Google’s ability to crawl your site… you may want to consider creating HTML copies of these Flash pages for our crawler.” At liveBooks, this is exactly what we’ve done.
To see an example of an html site produced along with every liveBooks flash website, simply disable javascript in your browser preferences, then add /website.html to the end of the url, like this: http://www.manginphotography.com/website.html As you can see, it is a fully-functioning website that duplicates all images and text content, including image comments (which are controled by you in the editSuite), file names, etc. are made available for indexing by search engines. Remember to re-enable javascript when you’re done!
It is no secret that more highly successful photographers from every genre, all over the world choose to work with liveBooks than any other web design solution available to realize their artistic vision and market themselves on the web. Our list of clients reads like a who’s who of photography (I won’t take up your time name dropping here, but visit our site for a few examples http://livebooks.com ).
Feel free to contact us any time with any additional questions. Our team of dedicated customer service specialists, all of whom have an extensive background in the field of photography, are ready to speak to you and find a solution that benefits you and your business.
As all the others here at liveBooks, photography has long been my passion. Check out my personal website here: http://mattplastique.com
nice discussion. especially all of the input from people trying to sell their own stuff. geez. get real.
All the livebooks sites take forever to load…and I’m on a T1 connection. Also, it doesn’t appear that livebooks has a “non-flash” option…so you’re stuck with an annoying, slow, flash site. You’re getting something less than optimal, but you’re paying a premium. It’s like paying for a Mercedes and getting a Buick.
I had seen ads for livebooks and, after reading the photogs quoted in the ads, had high hopes for my own commericial photography site, but I can’t believe anyone is paying what livebooks charges for what livebooks offers. Looks like the only photogs using livebooks are people who just don’t know or don’t want to learn about site creation, because one can get everything livebooks offers and more for little or nothing with a little customization and utilization of some gallery plug-ins with any of numerous CMS (joomla, drupal, cmsmadesimple, etc.)
Heck, the gallery builder in Adobe Lightroom blows livebooks away…no annoying flash, it’s INCLUDED with Lightoom, and you can use it on your site and not be locked in to hosting and you can easily move your site to another host. Livebooks biggest con is that not only does one have to give them $4000, but then one is stuck paying monthly fees…apparently one has to host with livebook as well, so if you want to migrate your site elsewhere your $3900 gets you NOTHING and you will be right back where you are now, STUCK, and still you won’t have any knowledge about web design to get you unstuck!
If you know absolutely nothing about websites and are just too scared or lazy to learn, spend your money with livebooks (there are probably much less expensive options for you, but you’ll have to do your own homework). However, speaking as someone who also once knew nothing about web design and was intimidated by learning a new skill, I would encourage you to spend a little time learning on the web how to design and build your own site, especially using a customizable CMS. It’s not that hard, much easier than learning the ins and outs of Photoshop. You won’t throw a bunch of money away for nothing and you won’t be held hostage by a web designer or some company like livebooks…you will be the master of your own domain…literally! Good luck.
Robert,
Obviously you have no idea what you are commenting about. Photographers want to be photographers, not learning how to build a website on their own! We appreciate a site that promotes our imagery and gets out of the way. I just took a look at their example sites and it is a who’s who of the industry. The sites loaded quickly and were quite elegant.
Spend time marketing and growing your business, not learning how to code–it will pay amazing dividends in the long run.
Off to buy a liveBooks site!