As a photographer or a creative professional, it should be easy to shoot or design your best work, day in and day out. That isn’t the problem. Showcasing your work is. If you are planning to sell your work online, that adds another layer of complexity to the process. To avoid paying an arm and leg for web design and development and to get started instantly, hosted portfolio services are a popular choice.
Pixpa promotes itself as a web app that assists photographers, artists and designers in creating a portfolio to showcase, share and sell all their online. Does it live up to the promise? We sure are going to check it out.
Overview
Overview
Pixpa websites are designed to focus on one thing only – your work. Great care is taken to make your work the centerpiece of the portfolio. Combining your creations with finely crafted interface, portfolio pages created with this web app will be a pleasure for visitors and potential customers to view, browse, share and buy your works.
Pricing
There are three paid plans to choose from and surprisingly, Pixpa doesn’t have a monthly subscription model. All accounts are charged annually and the prices are displayed in local currency based on your IP address. For US users, Pixpa starts at $9.99/month or $99/year.
Pricing is localized for your part of the globe
All plans come with the same set of features and they all differ only based on the number of images that can be uploaded to an account. To take the web app for a spin, you can make use of their free 14 day full featured trial period.
Ease of Use
After a really simple sign up process, a dedicated sub domain for your portfolio is created. To showcase the potential of the app, there is a sample portfolio preloaded in your domain. It’s nice to see what you can do with the service, but ensure that you replace everything with your own content before sending the link to potential clients.
Getting Started
What could bug you is the variety of domain and sub domain names one has to remember. There is a sub domain for your portfolio and then there is a totally different URL for editing the portfolio. Keep your registration email handy to avoid any confusion.
Creating a Portfolio
Begin creating a portfolio by selecting the template of your choice. Trust me, they have so many and I would recommend Pixpa just for their exhaustive and gorgeous collection of templates!
Site Design
Head over to the Design tab of the app and sift through the templates. Each template has 3 different styles, and you can live-preview the design with your portfolio’s content to make sure it looks like you want.
Templates
Your work is displayed as large images that are resized for lower resolutions automatically, without compromising on quality. However, if you are really particular about the quality of work, you could note the dimensions of images the template supports from the Design section and resize your own shots manually using Photoshop or your favorite image editing app.
Adding and Editing Content
Structures
Uploading images is a breeze, and you can control all the aspects of your portfolio from the Structures page. From here you get to organize the site the way you want. Move galleries, pages and other content items around to create sections, and reorder them at anytime. Add links to external websites or, even better, get the code that helps you embed any web page right within your website, which should be perfect for integrating your blog, social media page, and more.
Creating Slideshows
Pixpa isn’t limited to images. You can create both image and video galleries with ease. Slideshows play a pivotal role in showcasing images, and you can create as many as you want since all accounts include unlimited slideshows. From the Galleries section, you can create and edit existing slideshows.
Creating a Slideshow
Not interested to display your work to everyone? Try the Private Gallery feature to add some secrecy to your collection. Images added to a private gallery are password protected and only people who have the passwords can gain access.
Private Galleries
Additional Features
Pixpa makes sure that all portfolios have superb search engine optimization, and to maximize the results, adds relevant metadata to your content. Don’t worry, there aren’t a lot of details for you to furnish before the spiders come crawling in. Google Analytics integration is another interesting aspect of the app. When you are all done, link your personal domain to the portfolio instead of the branded subdomain for a professional touch.
SEO Options
Final Thoughts
Pixpa helps photographers, artists and designers get an online presence rather quickly. I personally liked the integration of eCommerce features right into the core of the app. However, being a player in the over crowded niche could be a challenge to Pixpa. There are way too many portfolio hosting services online, and it’s actually hard to get noticed. Pixpa has a great feature set, though, and they look like they’ve got a great chance to become a popular portfolio hosting site.
Share Your Thoughts!
How high does Pixpa rank in your list? Which one do you think is a better option – custom designed, self hosted portfolios or ready made ones like Pixpa templates?