Wordpress for photographers?

Bennp2000

Bennp2000

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Name
Paul
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Hi,
Currently I use a domain name and a 500px portfolio to create an online portfolio with a contact form:
www.PaulBennettPhotography.co.uk

Now, it could be argued that really, it isn't all that necessary. I'm NOT pro and I don't intend to try and go that way. I DO regularly get articles printed and get asked to do the odd job which suits me well (especially as a lot of it includes travel to places which I enjoy). Originally I needed a site because I hadn't had anything in print and it was an easy place to send people to.

However, I'm less and less over-awed by 500px and their site offerings as a whole. I was quite an early adopter and assumed things would progress nicely. They have, but not in the direction I was hoping and thus, I'm thinking it might be time for a change.

I've looked at Google sites and they look easy to set up but most look rather poor visually.

Wordpress is the other option I've thought of. I use/manage a custom wordpress site at work as part of my job but this was set up by my predecessor and thus I'm only really familiar with adding content and managing existing content. Also, this isn't picture heavy so the gallery we use there is less than ideal.

I'm assuming some TP users use WordPress for their site, any chance of sharing your thoughts and links?

Many thanks,
Paul
 
I've personally never used wordpress, but have seen loads of threads here on it and users talking about it.

If I remember rightly, there are some websites which sell wordpress templates geared towards photography websites.

Surprised no one's responded tbh. Obviously they don't want to give away their trade secrets ;)
 
Wordpress is actually a perfect platform for this sort of thing. I learned how to create my own themes a long time ago and kept up with the development of Wordpress ever since. The best thing to do is get an install up and running and play around with the default theme and begin tweaking things. You'll start to see the wordpress functionality within the theme files and get a clue of what does what.

There are quick ways of developing your own theme, in particular responsive themes using responsive CSS frameworks. Do a google search and you'll find a wide selection of frameworks to choose from.

Take a look at my own site, it's pretty basic but was built in a couple of hours and I've been adding to it ever since.

www.newvibes.com

It is built in Wordpress and uses Amazium as the css framework and also some jQuery plugins such as the lazy loader to help the site load faster on mobile devices.

Soon you'll pick it up in no time, and since people have been hacking and tweaking Wordpress for so long there are hundereds of thousands of people on the internet who have worked with it so a solution to any problem you come across is just there waiting to be found.

Let me know if you need any pointers or help with anything in particular.
 
Thanks, clearly I just posted at a silly time...

What I've got against a lot of the themes I've seen are the forced square (or rigid aspect ratio) thumbnails etc. which are a pet hate of mine (for 4:5 or 16:9 crops).
 
You can always post up whatever aspect ratio you like, just a lot of galleries force a square thumbnail etc. to click through to the full image.
 
Paul, that to me sounds more a restriction of the theme than Wordpress itself. Wordpress is very flexible, for example you can create your own thumbnail sizes within the functions.php file of your theme...

Take a look at this example...

in functions.php
Code: 
if ( function_exists( 'add_image_size' ) ) {
    add_image_size( 'homepagethumbs', 360, 240, true ); //(cropped to 360px x 240px) false for no forced crop
}

usage in template

Code: 
<?php  if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { the_post_thumbnail( 'homepagethumbs' ); } ?>

That will spit out the image code for the 'homepagethumbs' version of your post image.

Basically with that code in your functions.php file every image you upload to your post will have another version of itself created with the dimensions of 360x240 and you refer to it by 'homepagethumbs' or whatever name you want to give to that particular version of the image.

This example allows me to create a crop of the featured image for a post to use specifically on my home page. Can you start to see the possibilities? :D
 
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There are currently 977 wordpress themes (at least this is the number I get displayed if I click "add theme" without any search filters) so the best thing to do is to spend some time installing some themes and testing them.
I have found that it's difficult to really get a feel for a theme until you have tried it out on your site.
Some themes are really configurable so you can really perfect the "look" you want.
There are also some good "lightbox" plugins for displaying your pictures when people click on them to view them larger.
 
boliston said:
There are currently 977 wordpress themes (at least this is the number I get displayed if I click "add theme" without any search filters) so the best thing to do is to spend some time installing some themes and testing them.
Click to expand...

This is party the reason why I haven't just dived in (that and time or lack thereof).
 
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