Website builder?

What do people use for website building for photography? Wix, Wordpress, anything else? If Wordpress, what templates?

My legacy website http://www.wrecksandreefs.com was built from scratch and i no longer have time, energy or code knowledge to update/ maintain it. Plus over time my interests evolved and i want to split the site into 3, the Great Lakes will be legacy pics and Caves and Reefs will be two separate websites as they have very distinct audiences.

My needs are:

- Some sort of gallery feature where i just drag and drop and software sorts it all out for me. I have photoshop and can butch re-size, but would like software to do everything else.

- Scalable so that it looks nice on all platforms - currently a big issue for legacy site

- Somebody else does all the back end updates code for me - another big issue with current website. Some code is too ancient.

- a blogging feature

- Nice to have - Right click block to prevent copying of images

Many thanks!

Vlada

I use Smugmug. It checks off all your boxes except for blogging. One of the reasons I selected it was because of formatting for different devices. Smugmug provides an app for Lightroom making it very easy to add and subtract images.

There are various gallery formats to choose from. I am using two of them. One, journal, shows the images at a large size that one can scroll down to see other pix. This is good until one has several pages - I find that not many go to the last page. So for large galleries (more than about 100 pix) I use a horizontal matrix option. This option also has a starting pic.

I do not like the way smugmug generates watermarks so I generate them during the export from Lightroom. I have changed them slightly over time so I can see which pix have not been processed lately - it is easy to replace them - it is semi-automatic. One just has to work on the image in the develop module and then update the gallery with one click. One can set the max resolution by gallery. I am not using full size but this is an option. It has the right click block as an option for each gallery.

Smugmug also provides site analysis so it is possible to see which images and galleries are most popular. One can dive in and see which sizes are being looked it and what sort of device as well as OS. A surprising number use their phones.

I use Photo Folio.

It is a bit pricey... but it does all of the things that you are looking for, and more.

Very good at managing image quality/size on various platforms. It handles thumbnails beautifully.

A nice feature is the iPad app which enables off-line viewing; great for taking on remote dive trips ;-). Lots of other features such as pdf builder, "hidden/client" areas etc.

https://www.photofolio.io

Perhaps my own website isn't the most compelling example, but I found it very easy to establish and it has been completely stable. Editing content is quick and easy and the website is updated in real time.

https://www.immersed.net.au

Yes it is expensive (I pay $34/month) but it is secure, maintained and gives me peace of mind.