Landscapephotography, as with many other things in life, has been dominated by online presence for the last 20 years. Many find social media to be their most important venue, and for exposure towards a larger audience, it is hard to disagree. However, with recent years downfall (in my opinion!) of most social media, I think personal blogs and a proper gallery/homepage is more and more important.
I have always seen the need for my own homepage. A place where I am in full control, far away from algorithms and the other noise from social media. Since 2012 I have had more or less the same web-page, hosted by Photoshelter(TM). Back then I landed on Photoshelter for several reasons, but one important factor was their Lightroom-plugin. Fairly nice and somewhat customizable templates were also good to have. I have been quite happy with them for many years, but the last couple of years, I feel we have drifted apart. I have had a lot of trouble with the publishing-plugin. The templates are getting a little long in the tooth, and customization is somewhat restricted compared to some other host-services. They also seem to have more focus on other types of photographers than what I represent, landscape/fine art.
So, enter 2026, I decided to do some research and see what options I had. I wanted nice, minimalist templates, a good publishing plugin for Lightroom, good SEO-options, high speed and excellent stability and an easy interface both for the viewer and for me when I need to adjust something. And of course I wanted an integrated web-shop for prints.
Squarespace is obviously all the rage among fellow photographers, but they don’t offer a publishing plugin for Lightroom. Wix is the same. Smugmug do have a plugin, but I am not a big fan of their templates and customization. This blog is made with WordPress, and I have considered making my gallery/homepage the same way, but I find WordPress somewhat annoying to work with when some heavy lifting is needed. Honestly, with all the unstability, political noise, taxes, tariffs and whatnot coming out of the US these days, I started to look for a Europe-based host. For us europeans that might mean some extra security with respect to copyright, ownership, financial issues, cookies-policy etc.
Enter Photodec (TM). A French company that ticked all the boxes for me. I went for the 14 days free trial, but already after 3-4 hours of playing around, I understood that this was my new host. Very easy interface for set-up, tons of customization-options (really, everything!), excellent display of my images (of course you can choose resolution! 🙂 ), and a very stable plugin for Lightroom. A big leap forward for me is that images and galleries are instantly updated from Lightroom. With my old host, there was always several hours delay before the web-page was updated. And best of all, they are fully integrated with my favorite professional lab, a company I have worked with for years, Whitewall.
I could not have asked for a better hosting service. I am extremely happy with Photodeck. Even traffic on my homepage is way up, so they obviously have a good thing going with their SEO. Feel free to visit my new “home”, nordhaugphotography.com .
With all the customizable options available, I have restructured my galleries, made a few new ones, added some new-old images and deleted others. It’s funny how the presentation of the work affects how you work. I would think it would be the other way around, but my new webpage has actually motivated me to work on some new projects, and revisit some old “forgotten” ones.
By the way, I have absolutely no affiliation with Photodeck, besides being a full paying customer. They probably have no idea that I’ve made this short “review”.
LANDSCAPEPHOTOGRAPHY ETC. 