Wordpress photography sites (not blogs)

[tajart]

Wordpress

Wordpress

I set up my site using WP dot org as a way to share some of my images and experiences. I want the emphasis to be on the works as opposed to a blog. I renamed the blog area to "words" which allows me to occasionally share some back stories.
On the About page I've included some info about the site and will eventually add some "about me" info.

I've been experimenting with sharing photos, using my site, and two others. I've used most of the same images on all three sites, to see how they read, and can be found by others.

 

[sar-photo]

I've decided to go with Portfolio 2 from momnt - http://momnt.co/downloads/portfolio2/

I like the clean look and it comes with a great slideshow plugin!

Cheers
Simon

 

[sar-photo]

For displaying the pictures, do people prefer lightbox or a slideshow?

 

[david.elliott]

Lightbox with a slideshow option built in. Quite a few out there will do that -- let you click for lightbox then push play for slideshow.

 

[shadowfox]

Wordpress, today, is a great platform for building a full-featured website.

I created and host websites for my clients that are based on Wordpress + theme of their choice + custom coding.

Contrary to the common beliefs, you can make Wordpress sing and dance with other languages, not just PHP using a feature called "shortcode."

The trick is to find the Wordpress theme that you like, and there are thousands of them. Use Themeforest.net and go to this section: http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress/creative and you'll spend hours choosing among those (thats what I did often 🙂 ).

 

[cz23]

For displaying the pictures, do people prefer lightbox or a slideshow?

I prefer the thumbnail model over either of those. Slideshow, in my mind, should always be optional. And I find the animation effect of a lightbox changing dimensions to be distracting.

John

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

oh I see, i'm not sure I would recommend this approach, why not use something more appropriate to the task you're trying to do ?

Why would you not recommend this approach?

There are a number of plugins for WordPress which render it more than appropriate for what he's trying to do.

I'm also interested in knowing more about different theme recommendations. Hopefully the thread could stay on that course.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

For displaying the pictures, do people prefer lightbox or a slideshow?

I prefer to think in terms of "both". Slideshow works great for...slideshows; lightbox is best for focusing attention/"zooming" clicks.

 

[tajart]

update of website

update of website

i recently had my initial site infrastructure updated while maintaining much of the original content.

 

[OurManInTangier]

I'm moving away from my old website which was designed specifically for me to a wordpress site. Hopefully it should be up by next week.

The layouts, plug ins, templates and fact that bugs have been ironed out is a big draw on top of the usual photographic needs.

In terms of finding a suitable place to start, I was directed towards themeforest dot net. Well worth a look if only for researching.

 

[Frank Petronio]

What I noticed from having a WordPress site was that I had to check and run updates very frequently... almost daily maintenance to protect your site from nefarious hackers. I know any site/host is vulnerable but WordPress's popularity makes it a popular target.

That was several years ago and I got sick of playing webmaster.

 

[djcphoto]

What I noticed from having a WordPress site was that I had to check and run updates very frequently... almost daily maintenance to protect your site from nefarious hackers.

This certainly used to be true, but as from the latest version (3.7.1), security updates are now automatically applied.

 

[KenR]

Confused

Confused

Perhaps it's only me, but what's the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org?

 

[kxl]

Perhaps it's only me, but what's the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org?

My understanding is:

.com is a free site where your url is .wordpress.YOURNAME.com

.org is software that you upload to your website (although most if not all web hosting services already include it in their package).

I use wordpress as a photoblog on my home page, although I have not had the time to maintain it, so I am probably going to repurpose my home page.

From my home page, I have a link to my Photo gallery, which I built with Piwigo.

Note that I only use my website for static display. If I ever decided to start selling images, I would probably go to smugmug or zenfolio, since I really do not want to have to deal with the e-commerce and fulfillment.

 

[kennylovrin]

I would recommend people check out squarespace as well. I'd chose that any day over Wordpress if photos are the main content and the purpose is more of a portfolio than a blog.