One of the Premiere Sponsors for our 2006 Photograph of the Year Contest is Proimageguide, and I had a chance to ask them a couple of questions about their business and why having an online presence, as a photographer, is an important part of an amateur or professional photographers’ business plan. Here are some of the Q & A’s from our chat:

What is Proimageguide and what does it offer to the amateur and professional photographer?

For the amateur photographer, Proimageguide offers a fast solution to a professional looking portfolio online that’s easy to manage and very inexpensive. For the professional photographer, it offers tools such as an integrated PayPal shopping cart to sell your own photo products while eliminating expensive middle man fees.

What are the differences between using Proimageguide or just hosting your photographs with a service like Flickr, or even on the Corner Photo Galleries?

Proimageguide plays an important role by focusing on the individual photographer rather than a community of photographers. We believe it is best to showcase your work to potential paying clients with a professional portfolio of work that does not distract your customers with constant advertisements and non related links to other photos. It’s about marketing yourself and keeping the focus on the services you as an individual have to offer.

What sets Proimageguide apart from other photo-website companies?

There are many areas of our company that set us apart from other companies. Right from the moment you register with us, our online registration provides a full 3 month demo account without any credit card payment information. Other companies require credit card information that will automatically charge your account only after a few weeks. Hardly enough time to demo both the website or the customer service and most people forget to cancel before the demo expires. If your demo with Proimageguide expires, there are no charges to incur.

The Proimageguide website application also contains no hard coded advertisements back to our company website. Other companies embed header graphics and footer links back to the main company website redirecting your customers and clients. Proimageguide does not even provide an online database of our customer list.

Similar photo hosting companies allow photographers to sell a limited amount of photo products while charging commission fees on each sale with an already huge markup. Taking a different approach to online photo ordering, The Proimageguide Proshop allows our photographers to post up any product at any price without paying any commission fees per sale. As the photographer provides his own fulfillment, products such as in home printing with archival inks can be offered. You still have the option to have prints done at your local lab for pennies each, and then shipped to the customer.

You have two different levels of service. What are the main differences between the two levels?

The two different levels of service allow flexibility for the variety of clients that use Proimageguide. Some customers prefer to use the Proimageguide mainly for showcasing the portfolio of work such as models, actors/actresses, hair and makeup stylists, while other customers such as professional photographers may use Proimageguide for both portfolio showcasing, gallery proofing, and accepting online orders and payments from clients.

Creating a website can be difficult for a lot of people, with adding code, HTML, flash, etc, but Proimageguide is so easy. Can you take us through the steps of creating a site with Proimageguide?

Proimageguide focused a lot of attention on its management area to make it simple for customers that are not only new to managing a website, but fur customers that are new to a computer. Adding photos to the website are as simple as sending a photo through email. Each photo is automatically resized to fit all the different areas of the website, such as gallery thumbnails, slideshows, and larger image viewing. Adding text content to the website is as easy as working in a Word processor. No HTML or coding is necessary.

Every area you display on the website was organized to have it’s own management section. If you want to update your biography, click on the Biography tab. If you need to update your homepage, click on the homepage tab. Above each section we always display simple instructions so the user manual is basically built in.

Although you can embed Flash into areas of your Proimageguide website, we did not use Flash extensively in the application. We believe it would be better for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN to index actual text content and photos, rather than vector based flash movies. If our customers are taking the time to setup a website, we think our customers are looking to gain more web presence in these search engine directories.

I’ve noticed that photographers are now able to sell photographs from their Proimageguide site. Can you describe this service a little more?

To keep costs down for our customers, Proimageguide decided not to provide fulfillment for any photo prints or products a photographer may wish to sell. Instead we focused on creating an ecommerce cart that allows each photographer to post any type of product, any price, as well as shipping charges. Unlike other services we don’t charge commission fees for each sale, allowing better prices to be offered as well as better profit margins to the photographer. Our Proshop even allows the ability to provide different price packages and products for each client gallery. This is a great feature if you wanted offer photo prints to family and friends at cost.

Proimageguide supplied a 1 year-subscription to Proimageguide’s Level II Photo Sharing Website Service to each of the 10 finalists in the 2006 Photograph of the Year contest! I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s new site in a short while. Make sure to PM the URL’s of your new site to me so I can add them to our photography directory. For more information on Proimageguide and the services they provide, visit: http://www.proimageguide.com.