Environmental Stock Photo site is up and functioning

After several long, hard months of battle I have finally launched my stock photos site called nunukphotos.com. A significant effort. I used oscommerce and made extensive modifications by using (hiring) developers on rentacoder. Going this route has been difficult but in some strange way, satisfying. I feel I have a good product after all the work and stress - however I would probably not go this route if I had it to do all over again. Rather I would find some packaged photo website tool and use it. Why? Time.

The extensive oscommerce modifications necessary coupled with the fact that I am not a programmer and have had to outsource these "modifications", have taken months (6+) to complete. This is time that could have been used to focus on driving traffic and seeing if this business has any wheels. Far better to put something up in 1 to 2 weeks then by the time 6 months is up you will probably already have an idea whether it may or may not work (as a potential money maker).

On the positive side doing this the long way has allowed me to create tools and implement ideas that I would not be able to do in an out of the box solution. Many of these relate to search engine optimization and using a few tricks and ideas to appearing in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. So all is not lost - it is just that I am months behind schedule, many dollars over my meager budget and only just starting to do the marketing to learn if this approach to stock photography will be in any way successful.

However I'm happy with the product and will keep making additions and improvements moving forward. I have no lack of creative ideas to implement.