Help with travel/photography website

[mitsugirly]

I really wasn't sure where to post this, so I thought I'd try here.

 

I've been cruising steadily since 2010 and created a website several years ago with my travel reviews. They are very picture heavy. They give our day to day travel, either by land or by cruise ship.

 

I have the website divided up into tabs at the top, that contain various information to help those that come to the site, for things such as the cruiseline, land vacations, hotels and so on. You click the tab and it will take you to that section where you will click on what you are looking for. I tried to make it as user friendly as I could. I have a lot of followers from around the world. 

 

HOWEVER...I used Wix to set it up. I've paid quite a bit of money to upgrade and upgrade and now it's become so ridiculous to pay for that I am looking for something else. Wix has a limit on GB and they said I've doubled my limit and need to upgrade again.

 

Can anyone suggest something else that I would be able to use instead of Wix who has put a limit on my GB? Something affordable? I know it would be a chore to transfer everything from Wix to a new site (and wix doesn't make it that easy and I'd have to do it page by page on the back end with the html), but I'm in the middle of a review and it won't let me go further. 

 

Open to all suggestions please. I'm not a website builder savy person, which is why I went with Wix. 

 

Also, it's NOT a blog. It's an actual website.  

 

Can anyone take a look at it and give suggestions? travelwithmitsugirly.com

 

Thanks in advance for any help/input. 

[pierces]

Take a look at my sites at PPTPhoto.com and The Family Photographer. They are hosted by BlueHost which supports WordPress well. The galleries are done with jAlbum, which is very easy to maintain once set up. 

 

If the components look like they would work, I'd be happy to give you more info.

 

Dave

[eileeshb]

I’ll second Wordpress as a user friendly back-end. You are probably better off with a setup that splits the photo hosting to separate the costs. Using a service like jalbum means it’s setup to host a lot of high quality images without paying an arm and a leg. 

[mitsugirly]

Thanks for the information and I was looking at Wordpress but after checking into it, it said it didn't have any limitations on space however it also states "Accounts with an excessive database size, like 10GM total usage, would be in violation of our Terms of Serivce and Acceptable Use Policy." If you exceed the usage, you will be ask to reduce your usage and can be terminated. I'm already at 50gb. So that won't work. 

 

Also, I'm unsure how the photo hosting would work. My photos are used within the written reports and all over the place vs just going to a photo album. Would this even work like my site is set up?

 

I honestly don't want a blog. I find it confusing to look at or look for something even when I'm searching on someone's blog. I would rather keep it as a website. 

 

I just unsure of what to do at this point. I hate to lose everything I've worked years on but yet can't continue to post on it unless I pay to upgrade, which is $2,124!! (They have you pay for 3 years) on top of all the other things I already pay to have on the website. 

[Gardyloo]

I feel your pain.  Web hosting services are notorious for sucking you in for cheap prices, then sticking it to you at renewal times.

 

Is your domain (travelwithmitsugirly.com) registered with Wix also?  

 

If it were me, I'd find a free Wordpress theme template (thousands of them out there) and build a new Wordpress site using free or very low-cost extensions (like free photo galleries) then find a hosting service where you can park it.  You don't have to use Wordpress for hosting; most competitive hosting services (GoDaddy, HostGator, Dotster, BlueHost, many others) will let you load Wordpress sites with minimum effort.  

 

Here's a site (many similar sites out there) highlighting some free Wordpress photo themes.  10+ Best Free Photography WordPress Themes 2023 - aThemes

 

You can load a copy of Wordpress on to your home computer and develop the website offline, then upload it to a new hosting service quite easily.  You'd then switch the nameservers (the actual address used by the web to locate your files) so that when someone types travelwithmitsugirly.com into their browser they get the new website rather than the old one.  

 

Here's a video (one of many) that might be helpful in showing how this is done.  

 

 

I recently had to migrate (move unchanged) from one hosting service to another when the old service wanted to increase my plan's annual fee by 300%.  I moved to one of the above sites (GoDaddy in my case) where I got a 3-year plan for something like $100, or roughly $3/mo.  My site (which is quite clunky and needs an update big time) has about 8 GB of files (lots of photos) and the migration took 48 hours.  I could have (probably should have) developed a new Wordpress site and just uploaded it to the new host, but laziness won the day, as usual.  FWIW, here's the site: Garde à l'eau! – Gardyloo's photos, notes and more

 

It's really quite a simple process.  Good luck!

 

[pierces]

18 hours ago, mitsugirly said:

Thanks for the information and I was looking at Wordpress but after checking into it, it said it didn't have any limitations on space however it also states "Accounts with an excessive database size, like 10GM total usage, would be in violation of our Terms of Serivce and Acceptable Use Policy." If you exceed the usage, you will be ask to reduce your usage and can be terminated. I'm already at 50gb. So that won't work. 

 

Also, I'm unsure how the photo hosting would work. My photos are used within the written reports and all over the place vs just going to a photo album. Would this even work like my site is set up?

 

I honestly don't want a blog. I find it confusing to look at or look for something even when I'm searching on someone's blog. I would rather keep it as a website. 

 

I just unsure of what to do at this point. I hate to lose everything I've worked years on but yet can't continue to post on it unless I pay to upgrade, which is $2,124!! (They have you pay for 3 years) on top of all the other things I already pay to have on the website. 

 

Note that WordPress doesn't have to be a "blog" per se. A daily/weekly blog is just a series of short articles. "Blogging" your trips would just be really big, infrequent entries in your travel "blog". In a WordPress layout, you can have any number of static pages you need for intro, about or link pages. You can then create "blog" pages of any length to accommodate a trip review with illustrations. That way a review with a moderate number of notable illustrative photos could be posted to a "blog" page, automatically added to the blog list menu and have a link to a separate photo album in the review for the bulk of the photos from the trip. Wordpress gets very laggy with large albums which is why I chose to use WordPress as base pages for articles and intro pages and jAlbum for the galleries. When setting up a jAlbum gallery (you can make a separate gallery for each trip), you can make the "Home" button point back to the review page that sent you there. 

 

As for choosing a host site, the super-duper three-year intro prices are featured by many hosts. Once you own the domain name, you can move it as often as you want. You can move the physical site files by backing up your WordPress site, downloading it and loading it to another three-year deal and reloading your jAlbum directories to the new site.

 

Dave

[joshgates]

I use a combination Flickr and Ghost to host my travel site.

 

Flickr’s pro plan (around $80/year) has unlimited storage of full res files and you can embed them into whatever site you what at various resolutions or by letting it scale based on browser.

 

I use Ghost (ghost.org) as a CRM, but there’s plenty of other’s available, including keeping Wix as your host and just changing all your images over to Flickr.  Migrating from Wix would be a potentially huge undertaking, so splitting off to a different host for the photos could save a ton of work.