photo website, ads, your suggestions

hi fellows

i'm a lucky boy, because i do happen to have plenty holidays and travel a lot.
i'm just back from vietnam.
last month i was in turkey, the month before in japan.
etc etc.

so
i take plenty pics when i travel, and recently i made a small simple website with my pics on it to show my family and friends.

however it occured to me i could probably with a little more effort than now, build a better website, that might interest more people, because of the nice pictures and comments of different places, and with some adsense on that get some decent $.

as of now, my site (which i prefer not to show, as there are also a bunch of personal pics as it is only a friend and family site now) is very simple, classification of the pics by year, and within each year by travel.
then below each pic or so there is a commenting text.

given this, what do you feel would be the most suitable website design/structure/template to have those photos and comments easily navigated through, well SEOed, with well placed ads?

thanks for your suggestion.
mat

 

A blog sounds like the best medium for this project

 

thanks alfie, but the main interest in my site would be i believe the pictures, as there is a lot of them, much more pics than text in quantity and quality.

adding more text would be ideal of course, but as i just began this site and have pictures dating years back, it would take me a lot of time and effort (to remember what happened then) to write more comments.

do you think a blog would still be suitable in this case?

 

Of course, Photoblogging is extremely popular and common

Take a look at this site for some inspiration: http://www.photoblogs.org/

 

thanks alfie, it is indeed inspiring

 

I'd say that photography webpages have very low CTR compared to other travel related types of webpages (destination guides, travelogue entries, travel articles, etc...). Visitors may see dozens (sometimes hundreds) of pictures without paying attention to any text/ads.

 

sure, but nowadays bandwith is dirtcheap, and i mostly have pics, so i'll have to do with what i have.

 

If I was planning a trip, I'd love to visit a site which had stunning photos of the destination, together with good travel tips from someone who had been there.

So, in my opinion, if you were to combine your photos with a few paragraphs of useful travel info and tips, written as you would to a friend (not like a textbook) then I would probably visit every page on your site while planning my trip, and whenever a text link (adsense) with "best hotel rates" or whatever appeared, I would probably click it to find out more.

Good luck!

 

I love photography. I was just trying to point that, according to my experience, you shouldn't expect to earn a lot of money from Adsense ads in that type of pages. Adding other webpages with travel info (perhaps linked to the relevant photo pages) might help you to earn some money.

About ads placement, I tried many options and in the end I decided to have a 468x60 block of ads below the photo (and above the other thumbnails of pics from that particular destination). A 468x15 link ads unit above the photo might be a good idea as well.

 

You can also choose to create a blog for free which is hosted by Blogger or Wordpress

 

thanks guys for all the input, i'll probably make a blog with the best pics from my personnal site, with some info on the pic and the place, a little adsense here and there, and promote.

i'm a bit busy these days but i'll come back and show you the result when some work will have been put into it.

also, another question:
do you think i should have a domain such as, for exemple, my-travelling-pics.com, or something less keywordy but simpler, such as www.inkak.com or something short and similar although not keyword related?

thanks