Dave's new website build thread.

bass_junkie83

bass_junkie83

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Dave
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I am finally going to bite the bullet and (try to) build a new website.
I have been struggling with mine for quite some time now, as some of you have probably noticed, and thanks to a lot of advise and suggestions here I am going to take the plunge. Only thing is I don't know exactly what I am doing, so I am probably going to have a lot of stupid questions. To save me clogging up the boards with my waffle I thought it best to have one single thread for the whole sorry saga. :D

It is gong to be a wordpress based site, and I will be building it offline on some virtual server software which I am about to go and download now.

So while I am doing that it seems a good time to ask my first question. Can anyone recommend places to get a good theme suitable for a wedding photography website?
 
That's where I found this one. So many to choose from!

One of the things I am thinking about is how I would go about integrating zenfolio which I use for client galleries and print sales. Currently my gallery link directs to my zenfolio, which I have tried to make as much like my actual site as possible, but is still a long way off. Is there a way to be a bit more slick with it, or is that just something I would have to live with?
 
I'm not normally a bit fan of full screen image websites. I know its good to have images as big as possible, especially the first ones a visitor sees, but often I find it looks a little messy with menus overlaid. However this one looks quite snazzy.

http://jegtheme.com/themes/jphotoliolight
 
Well, I have made a start!

I decided to go with the tripod theme in the end. I have started with the homepage and set that up with a slider.

View attachment 20059

Now to start creating the rest of the pages. I want to set the pages in a logical order, not how I currently have my website set out, so they should flow the same way a potential customer would navigate the site.

So something like Home > Portfolio > Weddings > Prices > Contact > Customer area > Blog > About

I think that's about right from home to contact, then the last two bolted on the end as new visitors won't have a need to go to the customer area, and does anyone really read about pages anyway?

But What I am wondering is how to differentiate the home page from the portfolio? It was simple with my current site, the homepage had oddly cropped images and a load of text and the portfolio page is simply a gallery with lots of images.

Now with a simple homepage showing just images, it kind of just looks like a mini portfolio. So why have both? Hmm, might have to sleep on that one.
 
I think you made the right choice. The second one looked great too but there was almost too many options to choose from and sod's law dictates then that it'll do something you don't want and won't let you change it. I've had this with themes and the downside with Themeforest is there's no trial period and/or you can't see the backend to see if you can customise things the way you may want to before parting with money.

As for homepage, I've put what I think are my strongest images there then in gallery the more usual portfolio type slider gallery along with some blurb.
 
Thank you.

I think that is what I will do, just a few string images on the homepage. I think that may have been one of my mistakes before, too many images on the homepeage, visitors might have thought they had seen enough and weren't enticed further into the site.
 
Make sure your theme is 'responsive' - seems to be the new buzz word - in other words it will look good on phone, tablet, laptop and PC sized screens as it resizes and the layout dynamically adjusts.
 
Yep, it is a responsive theme. A big improvement over my current as that was quite tricky to use on a phone.

I have made some good progress, have created about half of the pages and started by using content from my current site to flesh it out for now. Once the site is fully built I will then go back and update the content before it goes live, which has got me thinking.

I am not a wordsmith, in fact my English is pretty crap. Are there people out there that specialise in writing good website content, and does anyone have any recommendations?
 
I integrate a WordPress site and Zenfolio galleries on my site, I just created a menu option called Client Area which links direct to Zen...seems to work ok and clients order prints ok.
 
KL755 said:
I integrate a WordPress site and Zenfolio galleries on my site, I just created a menu option called Client Area which links direct to Zen...seems to work ok and clients order prints ok.
Click to expand...
That's what I currently do, and expect I will do here. I have just never been able to make a zenfolio gallery page look close to the rest of the site. I don't know if it can be done or not.

boyfalldown said:
Yes - I've PM'd you
Click to expand...
Thank you, very helpful!
 
I have hit a wall, it was bound to happen!

The site is pretty much built now in terms of structure. All the pages are there with some basic content for now.
The only page I can't seem to create is for the blog. I have created a page entitles blog, put it up in the menu and am using the supplied theme for latests posts, yet sor some reason it is coming up as an empty page other than the menu. I just can't figure it out! Yes I have created a few test posts to populate the latest posts list, but nothing.

Any ideas?
 
On my page called "Blog", on the Page attributes I have to choose the blog template. Have you got this on yours too?

blog.jpg
 
Yep, I have done that but it isn't working.

EDIT: Stopped trying to use a pre-existing theme template and made my own and it seems to be working now.
 
Last edited:
Here's a strange one.

Trying to upload a favicon. I have created a .ico file and upload that to wordpress. But somehow wordpress converts that to a .png file and says it can't use it. Any ideas?
 
bass_junkie83 said:
Here's a strange one.

Trying to upload a favicon. I have created a .ico file and upload that to wordpress. But somehow wordpress converts that to a .png file and says it can't use it. Any ideas?
Click to expand...
How are you uploading it? Are you using something built in to wordpress or using an ftp client like filezilla?
 
I am using the themes built in favicon manages which allows you to upload it via the standard media uploader.
 
A png file should work ok with all modern browsers, but the website needs to know where the file is stored so I'd guess this is some setting in the theme somewhere. The html for this is typically something like this
Code: 
<link rel="icon"
      type="image/png"
      href="http://yourdomainname.com/youriconname.png">
If the icon file is stored in a asubdirectory that would need to be included in the path, e.g.
Code: 
href="http://yourdomainname.com/somesubdirectory/youriconname.png">
but I'm not sure where you'd change that in the theme. It usually goes just after the <head > attribute.

At least that is how I remember doing it, but it has been a while ...
 
I shall try and sort that once it is online I think.

On that note, I think it is about ready. At least I have done as much as I can off line.

Just need to find some time now to save my current site, get it down, put this one up and fix any bugs and allow some extra time for any problems along the way.
 
All uploaded now, went pretty smoothly.

I have a bit of snagging to do, but my most pressing issue is that my blog content isn't working.

I exported a .xml file from my old blog before I took that down, and have imported it to my new site.

When I view the blog page all the post previews are there, but when I go into a specific post there is no content.
In addition to this, when I go into the media library it has not brought over all the images, it shows the files there, but with no actual image.

Ie.
View attachment 23347

The thumbnails with actual images are ones that are part of the new website, the blank thumbnails are all content imported from my old blog.

Any ideas what this is and how to fix it?
 
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