Photo-Electric Interview Name of your website?Photo-Electric Your name? David Atherfold Your Location (city, etc) Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland Please give us a short summary of your website? Our website shows the very varied type of photography that we do. We specialise in portraiture, but we tackle almost anything~~ What inspired you to launch your own website? Like all photographers, to show of my work. When did you launch your first website, and what was it? Originally about ten years ago. It has had many revisions. At first it was just a hobby site, but when I turned professional it became a very important publicity machien How did you decide on a name for your website? Its all here:- http://www.photo-electric.co.uk/aboutus.shtml What makes your website different from other, similar offerings? Ours is all home made! Its not done from a template. We are professional photographers and the website pulls in around 50% of our business. What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?) It works well for us now, but we think it could generate more business for us How does your investment of time and money balance against your success? The biggest bang for the buck advertising we have. If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site? Hmm, I'd worry about it getting out of control so we could not update it when we wanted. If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand? Yes, as the site generates our work, and our work is local, not global, the work could not rise indefinitely What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with? Unreliable web hosting. We are with Lunarpages now. They are very good. What has been your biggest challenge? Having got the site looking fine on Frontpage, and Firefox, we found that it looked awful on Explorer 7. It was a big job to get it working properly. Now we check each page as we design it. What method has been most successful for promoting your website? Most of our hits come from Google. We have never paid for website promotion other than a link from Yell.com. Never again - it cost £300 and was responsible for 0.07% of our hits. How has running your website differed from your expectations? I thought I could keep it all html. But I had to learn Perl, then php. I have a little flash on the site, which I can use, but I don't really have the time to learn how to write it from scratch How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity? I've ran it for 1o years as photo-electric.co.uk. We also have the .com domain which is the same site. Its a permanent part of the business You are a photographer - why do you run your own website I'm an ex-engineer - its therapeutic. What is your website address? Photo-Electric | 
