good day,
i'm looking to put up a stock photography web site along the lines of corbis, Shutterstock, iStockphoto. of course at a much smaller scale, and i need as much help and advice as i can get.
like how much would that run me? the important parts that i really need in the site include the search option, private account info, payment plan and auto response after payment.. storage for say..50k low res photos and growing?
i will generate my own market and initial site traffic. i need a site that will look good and run well.
that said, who much should i set aside, this is a two man thing so my budget is nowhere near that of the sites above.
any help you can give or direction you can point me at would be great!
thanks
PS, and thoughts on good web hosts for this too?

Have you considered scripting the site yourself if it's on a small scale? Or are you looking for more of a slice and dice pre-made solution like Gallery2 which has e-commerce features?
Of course personally for me, I tried to configure Gallery2 on my photography website and it gave me such a headache that I just learned PHP instead and coded the damn thing myself (which by the way took less time than me sifting through the obfuscated documentation).
Anyway my point is... sometimes prepackaged solutions aren't really as easy as they might seem.
As for cost, it would really be contingent upon how much scripting you do yourself and if you're going to hire a coder/designer for your site. Other costs might be stuff like SEO and advertisements, and obviously hosting costs.
As far as who to host your website? Gosh I don't even know if anyone around here can answer that ;). Of course be prepared for biased answers as it seems a lot of folks run hosting companies around here. :stickout:

thanks for the info jyc, i have thought of scripting it myself, but i figure time wise ill get more done by having somebody else do it, while coming away with a better site. whats an SEO?
true though, this is a hosting forum, lets see what comes up then. thanks