Hi- I am setting up a website/blog where I can 1)post photos and dialogue while traveling. and 2) a site where all of our trips have a link where the trip photos are stored and accessible.

right now, we use shutter fly which is ok, but cumbersome and not visually pleasing. I would love to view the blogs/websites of people who have done it right!!

Thank you for any inspiration!

High cathygreen. Will probably get more responses by posting on the Travel Tips forum but I will give it a shot.

We have always used TravelPod in the past. The upsides are that it is extremely easy to use either from a PC or tablet, tech support are v. Helpful and it's free. The downsides are that it is looking very dated now.
Here is a link to our blog
http://www.travelpod.com/members/candcthai

Based on her experience on running her recipe blog, my wife has convinced me to switch to wordpress for our next big trip starting next week. What she has done so far is looking a lot better ( but nothing to publish as yet) As far as storing photos is concerned, one of the attractions of wordpress is that you can store on the site or simply link to a cloud server like onedrive, Flickr etc. The downside is that wordpress seems less user friendly ( at least to me!) . Certainly worth a look though

Many people like Wordpress. Take a look at this long-running site: www.wired2theworld.com You'll need to buy a wordpress "theme."

The other way to go is a custom-designed site like Cheryl's photo site: www.marlandc.com

Wordpress has lots of available support, but be aware that it is limited in what it can do.

thank you- these replies are very helpful. We have been using shutter fly, which is ok, but it is difficult to enter text- the site is very temperamental and text is often lost.

Google's blogger is very easy to use. I have had a blog for 5 yrs although I go in alterating bouts of "neglect" and "bloglove".

I'm another fan of wordpress (see mytimetotravel.wordpress.com) but I only post a few photos there. For photos I prefer smugmug, even though it's not free. Wordpress is free unless you choose to pay for a URL that doesn't include "wordpress", or need additional storage or features. If you put up a lot of photos I suspect you'd have to pay for more storage.

I use Blogger which I recommend for ease of use. I'm not particularly technical (though my husband is a programmer) and I built this travel blog
http://somuchmoretosee.blogspot.com

I looked into WordPress at the beginning as everyone recommended it as by far the best platform, with the most flexibility. But I found it a little complicated to start. Now I've been blogging for a few years I can see the limitations of Blogger but it's great if you are looking for a simple site, otherwise go with WordPress.