What's the best way for my client to add pictures to website

Question

I am working with an artist to make her personal website. She would like to sell her artwork from the website. The issue is, she would like to be able to add, remove and price the artwork herself. She would also like to use paypal as the payment method.

Obviously design and coding is easy for me, that's all static. I am not sure however, what the best method would be to set up a way for her to add artwork herself.

I know there are some open source e-commerce sites (magneto, zencart ect.) but I have never used these and feel they might be a bit overkill for a simple art site. Is there something else really simple I should use?

Any general thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Why don't you create a simple administration panel where s/he can add, remove and price the artwork? Do you know any programming languages? PHP?

Answer 2

I recently found a really cool (and free) method of using php and javascript to upload, resize thumbnails, and display all uploaded content from the folder.

Taking this code from a free tutorial and pairing it with a customized javascript gallery looks really slick (used it for my own photography site as well as a few clients who loved it).

Very soon I will be combining it with a site for a historical golf course architect... a gentleman has come to me with hundreds of pictures he would like to store on the web, but he wants the capability to upload himself at any time. The trick is this: If your client artist wants to price it herself, the gallery use would require her to be able to navigate the basic html framework enough to change the descriptions which appear beneath all of the pictures as she adds/changes them.

If you want to get started on your own check out some of the tutorials here: http://net.tutsplus.com/category/videos/screencasts/page/3/

as well as finding a gallery that you both like for displaying the photos in an attractive way... Let me know if you want anything else from me :)

Answer 3

Virtuemart is based Joomla CMS , very easy to set up, an Open Source eCommerce solution. You might find a lot of free extensions of Joomla for photo gallery and other things.

Answer 4

Use a ecommerce site, its the obvious choice if she wants to sell stuff.

Zencart isn't as overkill as you think - it allows you to remove all the bits you don't want from the site using its admin gui; so you keep just the categories and the cart sections.

It also has options (IIRC, but I may be thinking of a different one, like CRELoaded) that provide for pay-and-download links.

Certainly, reusing ecommerce code will be a lot easier than writing your own.

Answer 5

Always use an existing framework for commercial sites. It's just too easy to make a silly mistake which allows hackers to take over control of the server.

Answer 6

Gallery2 is an excellent web-gallery software, suitable for presenting images, videos, and audio.

It has a "CheckOut with PayPal" plugin.

Gallery2 will require some time to configure, it is unlikely that you will use it "as is" after install.

Gallery2 is easily embeddable - provided minimal PHP skills, and good HTML/CSS skills, one can make it fit inside any design (maybe except for the grid-like thumbnails layout, which I guess is possible but harder than average).