If you’re looking for an easy way to share photos online, but you still think it’s nice to have a physical, tangible photo printed on paper, you may be happy to discover the services listed in this sidebar, which provide both free online photo album services and an easy way for you — or anyone else with access to your photo album — to order prints.

To create a photo album, you just upload your images; they become instantly available on the Web to anyone with your user ID and password. (Passwords are required to ensure privacy so you can restrict who views your personal
images.) You don’t even have to optimize your images (optimizing involves reducing the file size of images so they download faster), so you won’t need an image program such as Photoshop. Indeed, sites such as Ofoto and Shutterfly encourage you to upload high-resolution images because the better the resolution, the better the print quality.

The following sites offer online photo album and printing services:

• Ofoto (www.0foto.com): Kodak’s online photo site makes it easy to upload images for free and share your photo album with friends and family. Like other photo sites, Ofoto makes money by charging for prints. At 29 cents per print, Ofoto is not the cheapest, but they boast that the archival quality of their pictures means they’ll last as long as conventional film prints. The site offers basic image editing and cropping tools and enables you or anyone with access to your site to create and order printed calendars and photo books from your pictures.
• Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com): Shutterfly offers simple editing tools, enables you to post and share photos for free, and sells printing services. Shutterfly has an intuitive interface, and their specialized printing options enable you to turn your pictures into greeting cards, bound photo albums, personalized calendars, coffee mugs, T-shirts, or tote bags. Prints at Shutterfly cost 29 cents each.

• Yahoo Photos (photos.yahoo.com) offers online photo album services similar to Ofoto and Shutterfly, but their digital prints are priced at only 19 cents each.

Different types of sites

Here’s a brief list of some of the different kinds of Web sites you can create and the technical options that go with them:

• Online photo album sites: Even if you plan to create a more complex Web site later, you may want to set up an online photo album site because it’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to put photos online. Best of all, these photo sites are free, and they don’t bombard your pages with lots of advertising like the free Web site services at Geocities or Tripod. Photo album sites make their money by charging for prints, which they are happy to send to you or your loved ones for about 20 or 30 cents each. The most popular free online photo album sites, including Ofoto.com, shown in Figure 1-1, are featured in the “Photo album and printing services” sidebar.
• Free online services: If price is your biggest concern and you want to create a Web site, you may be pleased to find that several companies will let you publish your site for free. The catch is that these companies then sell advertising on your pages, and you have no control over what ads will run next to your words and pictures. Yahoo! features a free Web site creation tool at Geocities.com, and you’ll find similar solutions at Angelfire.com and Tripod.com. All three enable you to create template-based sites or to upload your own pages to their system (although they offer limited space and visits to your site). You find more about these and other Web server options in next article.
• Specialty Web-based solutions: The easiest way to create a professionallooking Web site for your family is to use an online service, such as family.myevent.com, as shown in Figure. You’ll find similar services at www.eweddings.com and www.babyjellybeans.com, but I chose to feature family.myevent.com because I think it’s one of the best in terms of price and ease of use and because you can create a variety of Web sites in one place (for weddings, babies, bar mitzvahs, or any other event). The family.myevent.com site offers a complete package of features, including planning tools, maps, and hotel reservation systems. Simply choose the template you want for your design, fill in a few forms, and upload your photos. You can create and publish a complete Web site in a matter of minutes.

• Blogging software: Millions of people now have blogs, or online journals, on the Internet. Their popularity has spawned a variety of software programs designed to facilitate easy updates, such as Blogger.com, as shown in Figure. A blog may be your best option if you want to make frequent updates to your Web site. One of the more famous family blogs is The Trixie Update, which Trixie’s stay-at-home dad updates many times a day to keep her mom informed while she’s at work. That site and many other blogging sites are featured in next article.
• Predesigned templates: I included with this book a collection of templates to make it easy for you to create a variety of common Web sites, such as a wedding site and a baby site. To use these templates, you need a Web design program, such as Dreamweaver, and an image program, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 3. Although you have to know the basics of these programs to create a template-based site, the process is still much easier than creating a site from scratch. You also have more design control than you do if you use templates at an online service such as Tripod, where you can change only the content. When you edit templates in a program such as Dreamweaver, you have the option of altering the design as much or as little as you choose. Many Web design programs include templates you can use, and you can buy or download free templates from a variety of Web sites. To use the templates included on the CD, check out next article through 14.

An online service like this one makes it easy to create a family oriented Web site without special software or technical
expertise.

• Fully customized sites: If you use a program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver MX (which is what I used to create my own Web site, featured in Figure) or Dreamweaver, you can create a fully customized Web site. You’ll need more technical expertise to create a customized Web site than you need to use one of the template options, but you’ll have the greatest design control over your pages. Even if you start by using a template to create your site, you can always go back later and further customize your pages in one of these programs. However, just mastering the technical features of a Web design program doesn’t make you a great designer. Templates can help you avoid common design mistakes and create a professionallooking site, even if you can’t draw a stick figure.
• Database-driven sites: The most sophisticated Web sites on the Internet, such as the online store at Amazon.com or the news site at CNN.com, were created by using complex programming and databases. Combining a database that records information about users with the ability to generate pages automatically is what enables Amazon to greet you by name when you return to their site, track your orders as you buy books, and even make recommendations based on your previous purchases. I definitely don’t suggest that you begin with a custom database. You don’t need anything this sophisticated anyway, unless you want to sell lots of products or publish dozens of articles and photos to your site every day.