If you want to give a presentation of your artwork online which converts to sales, you need a portfolio website. This type of website is optimal for professionals in the niches of photography, digital art, creative writing, music and more. It may seem that creating an appealing and easy-to-browse portfolio website takes an expert. Well, indeed, powering a modern animated Continue Reading
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The post So You Want to Make a Website? Part 1: Squarespace versus WordPress appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Carl Spring.
Welcome to the first of a 5-part series of articles on how to create your website. The series examines which platforms to consider using, through to SEO (how to get your website to rank better on search engines). While the focus of these articles is on the DIY aspect, a specialist web designer can be a worthwhile investment in many situations. Some are also cheaper than you think.
As with the discussion of Apple versus Android, the discussion of the better platform to build your website on has staunch supporters on both sides. While there are other service providers, this article focuses on two of the leading site builders used today; Squarespace and WordPress.
Choosing which web platform to use can be a hard decision. Both are excellent, used by many companies and individuals and both platforms have their strengths & weaknesses. There are pro’s & cons to each system. However, you can create a great website using either platform.
The Apple versus Android arguments transfers well into discussions over which of these two platforms you should use. Squarespace is a closed system that “just works,” whereas WordPress is a much more customizable system, with a multitude of plugins to use. However, WordPress requires a slightly higher level of knowledge to get the best results.
Let’s look at each platform in a little more detail.
WordPress may look complicated, but it isn’t as scary as you think.
WordPress is insanely popular. The WordPress website states that 32% of the web runs using their platform. Moreover, the website you are reading this article on uses WordPress too.
In reality, WordPress has two different platforms: the self-hosted version (you host the website on your own choice of servers) and WordPress.com, (the hosting gets managed for you). Web hosting is the space on the web that stores your website. When visitors type in your website address, it retrieves your website from the server so that the visitor can view it. Hosting costs can vary depending on your needs, but you can find reliable hosting for your WordPress site for under $ 5 per month.
The key appeal with WordPress is its flexibility. Many people tend to go for the self-hosted version because of the ability to add more plugins and themes. Whereas wordpress.com limits the plugins and themes you can use, which is in some cases for good reason. However, I shall get to that in a moment. The ability to use these relies on you choosing a more expensive monthly plan.
Although it may seem daunting for the uninitiated, self-hosting is more simple than you may think. If you purchase your domain name (the website address), and the hosting with the same company, things are even easier. Many hosting companies have one-click WordPress install, which means your hosting service installs the latest version for you at the click of a button. Using self-hosting also means you can set up a professional email address associated with your website (name@yoursite.com).
The main reason people love WordPress is its flexibility. As an open source platform, WordPress has thousands of templates to create the perfect style for your website. Their style and prices range from free to hundreds of dollars. Generally, the paid themes come with more features. However, there are some fantastic free themes to get you started.
With some coding knowledge, you can tweak your website design to achieve a completely custom look. However, that means learning how to code or employing a developer, which may not be something you wish to do.
As well as an almost infinite number of themes, there are also a multitude of plugins available. These plugins can help with everything from improving your SEO, through to creating beautiful galleries or adding purchasing options to your site. Whatever you want to do with your site, chances are there is a plugin out there to make the job more simple. These plugins (like themes) range in price from free through to around $ 50 (US) for premium plugins from high-end developers.
While also a strength, the main issue with WordPress is its open source nature. Many of the themes and plugins out there are well created, but there are some that are created by amateur developers. These plugins may have issues that can range from content not displaying correctly on your site through to taking your whole website out with an error. You also need to be mindful of security. You do not want your website to get hacked via a rogue plugin. When choosing your hosting, always make sure you look at the protection they offer you and your website.
The learning curve with WordPress is steeper than a platform like Squarespace. For those with little technical knowledge, it can be daunting. However, there is a vast online community to help and thousands of hours of training if you have the time to invest. As no-one strictly owns WordPress, there is no specific customer service option like you get with Squarespace. So, if you run into a problem that you cannot fix, you have to be reliant on your knowledge, Google searches, and the kindness of others through the forums.
So many design choices can be made without any need for coding knowledge.
Chances are, you’ve heard of Squarespace. They have a slick advertising campaign that’s all over the media. While there are other website builders out there (Wix being the main alternative), Squarespace is considered by many to be the best.
Squarespace is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website builder. The design works around a style editor, where you can change the design of your site. While it’s not as customizable as WordPress, you can make a lot of changes to your pages without any coding knowledge.
The key to Squarespace’s success is simplicity. Squarespace takes care of hosting your site, and you can register your domain through them too. These options make the whole process more straightforward than the WordPress option. However, this comes at the expense of the vast range of customization options available with WordPress.
Squarespace has many beautifully designed templates. To the untrained eye (nearly all of the general public) the templates look like you have spent much money on a beautiful website. In general, the style is quite minimal, with the focus on photography to make the template shine. All Squarespace templates come optimized for viewing on mobile devices. You can also preview your website on a computer, tablet, and phone with the simple click of a button. These templates are all tried and tested and guaranteed to work across devices, which is gives peace of mind.
Within each template, there are several page designs to get you started. You can tweak these using the tools within the software to create a personalized page. You can change the position of text, image sizes, colors and fonts, all without needing to learn a single line of code. That isn’t to say there is no learning curve with Squarespace, but it won’t be long before you feel confident using it. There is also a vast support network online.
Plugins with Squarespace are limited. However, they all work seamlessly and make the process simple. By now, you may be sensing a theme here?
Something that is helpful for many users is the dedicated customer service available. You can email your issue, and one of the Squarespace team gets back to you personally, addressing your specific issue. This feature is awesome for the less technically minded. Squarespace is quick to respond and always provides you with the official information to fix the problem.
If you’d like to get a little more creative with your Squarespace site, you can write custom CSS into pages and inject code. However, most people choose Squarespace, so they don’t need to bother writing code. You probably want to concentrate more on what you do, which is take photos. Rather than learn how to code and spend much time learning how to work a website platform.
Concerning small business, Squarespace has features to sell products through their platform. Moreover, they are now adding email marketing to their platform too. So, Squarespace is becoming a one-stop shop for small businesses.
The final thing to factor in with Squarespace is the cost. Prices start at $ 144 per year or $ 16 per month. For the top e-commerce package (which many of you won’t need) comes in at $ 480 per year or $ 46 per month.
To sum up, Squarespace is a more expensive option, as the costs are ongoing. However, when you compare it to the price of paying for hosting, purchasing a nice theme and a couple of decent plugins for a WordPress site, there is little difference over the first 12-18 months of ownership. After that first year though, WordPress is a cheaper option.
However, if you want a new theme after 18 months (which many people tend to), the price comes back to being even (if the theme is not free). Also, you have the benefit of tried and tested designs and plugins as well as customer service.
That depends on your needs. If you’re a technically-minded person and have the time and inclination needed to get the best from it, then WordPress could be the ideal platform for you. However, if you want a website that looks great and is easy to set up and use, Squarespace is for you. Although, just like iPhone and Android, once you get into a system, you tend to stick with it.
Me? I’m a Squarespace guy (and an Apple guy). The reason is simple. Squarespace is pretty much hassle-free.
Although I have a grasp of coding and consider myself technically minded, Squarespace has everything I need. It is simple for me to work with now that I know my way around its features. There is support on hand should I need it, and the pricing difference isn’t big enough to make me move over.
I have had WordPress sites before (and am looking at it for a project I am working on right now), and I know lots of successful companies who use them (DPS for a start). I like the minimal hassle and if that comes at the expense of customization, then so be it. However, that’s me. What do you guys think?
The post So You Want to Make a Website? Part 1: Squarespace versus WordPress appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Carl Spring.
It’s a new year and Imagely has released a great new Lightroom gallery plugin to make our lives easier. If you run your own photography website on WordPress, like countless other photographers, then you have probably come across Imagely and NextGEN Gallery.
Imagely provides WordPress themes and hosting, focused specifically on photographers. They have terrific support, and will make your life much easier when it comes to hosting a website. They are a service that I consistently recommend to photographers looking to create new professional websites.
Even if you already have a theme or WordPress service that you enjoy, like me, Imagely provides a gallery plugin called NextGEN Gallery. This gives you a variety of options to display your photography. After a significant amount of research on the right gallery plugin, NextGEN Gallery won me over. Both the free and paid (NextGEN Pro) versions provide you with a wealth of visual options for your gallery and make the management, proofing, and selling of your work a breeze.
The NextGEN Pro Thumbnail Grid Gallery
But now they have added a new Lightroom plugin, which makes their offering even more enticing. Enter the Imagely NextGEN Lightroom plugin, which syncs your Lightroom catalog directly to your NextGEN Galleries. Suddenly, you can add or remove photographs and alter your albums without leaving Lightroom.
The NextGEN Lightroom plugin allows you to create new galleries or albums directly in the plugin. You can upload images directly to these galleries, edit the filename and file information, which can help with SEO, as well as specify the image size, format, quality, color space, and sharpening. The convenience cannot be overstated. What used to take five steps, exporting the file to your computer, logging into your website, selecting the correct gallery, uploading the new version of the photo, and editing the photo information – now takes only one step.
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The plugin gives you a variety of export options.
The plugin can be downloaded here and is simple (5 minutes) to install. Here is the full documentation to get it up and running, but after installing it all you need to do are four steps.
Under the Library panel, navigate to Publish Services, then Imagely and select “Set Up”.
Add the description for the website you are uploading to and the WordPress settings (your website address, username, and password).
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Under FTP Settings, navigate to edit under the preset menu, then enter your FTP or SFTP credentials given to you by your hosting company.
Click the Browse button, navigate to your /wp-content/ folder, and save. Click OK to close the module an then click “Fetch from WordPress” under FTP Settings.
As you would regularly export your images using Lightroom, select the correct settings for the images that you would like to upload to the gallery. This includes color space, size and resolution, sharpening, metadata, and the watermark.
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Creating galleries and albums through the plugin is a breeze. The first step is to right click on Imagely under Publish Service and select Collection or Collection Set. Collection will create a new NextGen gallery while Collection Set will create a new NextGen album. Collection Sets can hold other Collection Sets and Collections, while Collections can only hold images.
Add images to a Collection and select “Publish” to add the gallery or album and to add the new images into them. Already published photos will be displayed in the “Published Photos” section while new photos will be under the “New Photos to Publish” section. In addition to adding new photos, you can also modify and delete them through the plugin. Clicking publish after you make these changes will sync them with your website.
There is a lot to be said about how advances like this can make our lives easier as photographers. But the ability to see and alter our website galleries directly in Lightroom, where most photographers do most of their work, is an incredible advantage, both in helping us to figure out the correct sequencing of our portfolios as well as to make it as simple and streamlined as possible to edit these galleries.
Have you tried out this plugin? If you have a WP site what’s your workflow? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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The post The New Imagely NextGEN Lightroom Plugin Will Rock Your WordPress World by James Maher appeared first on Digital Photography School.
Are you looking for free photography themes? Here you’ll find 15 incredible designs developed especially for the purpose. Who can use them? We guess these WordPress themes will be useful for artists, designers and developers. In a word, for everybody who wants to save some money on his/her future website design. Free themes don’t have 24/7 support like their premium Continue Reading
The post 15 More Free WordPress Themes for Photographers appeared first on Photodoto.
Give your photography the online showcase it deserves. In this collection, I handpicked 25 best and free WordPress portfolio themes to build your photography website or blog on. There is no need to spend money to create your presence online. If you’re seeking for a free solution to create your first portfolio website, these WordPress themes are the best choice Continue Reading
The post 25 Fresh & Free Portfolio WordPress Themes 2014 appeared first on Photodoto.
WordPress photography themes are designed to show off your photography portfolio. They’re intended to enhance the visual imagery that you create. In this article, you are going to see a group of WordPress photography themes that are not just friendly for to your photography, but also your business.
We recommend for you to click on each image and view the live demos of the themes before making a decision on which to purchase.
Which of themes 13 friendly WordPress photography themes is your favorite and why? Which do you think is best for your photography business and why?
A WordPress photo gallery plugin should have the ability to easily generate a beautiful photo gallery display on any post or page. A portfolio plugin should provide users with the ability to manage portfolios or albums and create galleries when desired.
Below are a list of WordPress photo gallery plugins available to use on your website. If you had to pick one of these 12 plugins, which you choose and why?
NextGEN Gallery is a fully integrated WordPress photo gallery plugin with dozens of options and features.
Lightbox Evolution is a tool for displaying images, html content, maps, and videos in a “lightbox” style that floats overtop of web page.
Present your galleries in an eye-catching unique new way. Load images from Facebook and Flickr or use NextGEN gallery or make a responsive banner/slider of Recent posts using their featured images!
Pixwall is used to create animated slideshows with particular effects, and you can use it also for fullscreen background slideshows.
RoyalSlider for WordPress is a cross-device jQuery content slider with touch-based navigation and responsive layout.
“Slider PRO is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress on the market.”
A user-friendly slider where you can add global settings or local (per slide) settings to each layer or sublayer. You can change delay times, easing types, durations and much more with the WYSIWYG editor.
Responsive and full of motion
WP Ajax Grid is a WordPress Plugin which allows you to create dynamic grids of wordpress posts loaded with AJAX technology using a simple shortcode controlled by several parameters.
The Portfolio Post Type plugin gives you a shortcode called [ portfolio ], which pulls content from the Portfolio post type.
Photographs and images – these are the powerful bullets you can send out into the world to get its attention. But what good are bullets if you do not have the appropriate device to fire them? Simply tossing them won’t do the trick; you will need a formidable gun with the right attributes – WordPress and its amazing selections of photography themes. Check out the following top 10 WordPress photography themes that will rock your world!
1. Photocrati
This theme seems to be the crowd’s favorite, and with its 15 various styles and four home page designs which allow for maximum flexibility minus the need for coding, it is rightly so. Aside from its amazing selections of designs to choose from, Photocrati also comes with its very own e-commerce image galleries. With this theme, displaying AND selling your photos online cannot be any easier!
2. Viewfinder
This timeless theme allows your works of art to take center stage with its classy design. Viewfinder comes in two different styles (light or dark) and offers the option to add countless galleries. With the wide scope of choices, you can set up your online presence as it suits you.
3. Deep Focus
Looking to turn your WordPress blog into a completely operational online image gallery while still upholding all of the characteristics of a normal blog? Then this theme might just be what you are looking for. DeepFocus is a polished portfolio theme that expands on iPhoto, gallery, and other previous gallery themes. With a gallery layout, a blog, and a CMS-style homepage, this could be the answer to the prayers uttered by photographers and artists hoping to wow the online realm with their creative presence. You will also be happy to know that cropping of photos on post pages is no longer necessary, thus, you can make use of landscape and portrait images.
4. Style
The name says it all! This theme, while far from being minimal, gives a clean feel to the overall design with its nicely spaced out elements. Style ingeniously manipulates white and dark spaces combined with elegant typography to give creative individuals a highly clean (yet stylish) web presence.
5. Evolution
Evolution is a totally responsive design and has the extraordinary capability of adapting to different screen sizes. With this theme, which comes in 4 unique layouts, your browsers can admire your site on handy mobile phones and tablets without having to zoom and scroll. The layout of the theme automatically adapts to the smaller screen and dish up your content accordingly. Evolution not only serves the purpose of showcasing your portfolio, it also acts to widen your audience reach.
6. Work
Work can give you a helping hand with building your portfolio through its abundant built-in page templates capable of creating up to four column gallery layouts. Whether you want to showcase illustrations or photographs, this theme can give you a creative boost.
7. Boxed
Boxed is a sophisticated and responsive full background portfolio theme designed to aid you in producing a tasteful theme, which makes use of a distinctive left-sided navigation but still keeps the site in the browser’s center. It gives you the option of choosing a full-screen background image slider to show different images on a page or a normal static image instead. No matter which option you go for, you can never go wrong with the clean and modern design of the Boxed theme.
8. Exposure
Heaps and heaps of exposure is what you will get with this theme. With its tons of features, user-friendly unbranded Options Panel, and superb documentation, showing off your work with Exposure can be a breeze!
9. Picture This
A full screen theme that abides by a minimalistic and unique concept – this is the perfect description of PictureThis. It boasts of a full screen image slideshow, a plethora of color choices, cutting-edge portfolio options, countless sidebars, and 3 custom widgets. With all these fantastic features and pleasing aesthetics, PictureThis is ideal for budding artists out to make a lasting impression.
10. Done
With its highly customizable features and multipurpose benefits, Done can surely cater to several types of business or private portfolios and blogs. You never have to worry about getting the job done with this theme!
There are heaps of WordPress photography themes out there, but you should start with these top 10. Let your needs and preferences guide you, and choose the theme that will set the online world on fire!
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Sunny Popali is SEO Director at http://tempocreative.com, an Arizona Marketing firm specializing in digital and internet marketing services including web design, SEO, social media and strategy.
There are many WordPress gallery plugins on in the WordPress plugin directory. Some are simple plugins with minimal features and some have a wide range of options. Some WordPress gallery plugins use the built-in media control, some use custom post types and some have their own proprietary system.
Below we are going to share what we believe are the best of the best, the cream of the crop. Not only from they’re functionality, but by the statics behind it. (stats as of September, 2012)
Without a doubt the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, NextGEN Gallery has been proven over time. NextGEN Gallery is a fully integrated image gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features.
Requires: 3.4 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.2
Last Updated: 2012-8-21
Downloads: 5,835,825
Easily add a clean, responsive javascript slideshow to your site. The slideshow integrates well into any design and supports fluid-width themes.
Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.2
Last Updated: 2012-9-19
Downloads: 214,322
Lightbox Plus permits users to view larger versions of images, simple slide shows, videos and content all in an overlay.
Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Last Updated: 2012-1-1
Downloads: 554,718
This plugin allows you to implement gallery page into your website.
Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.2
Last Updated: 2012-7-27
Downloads: 159,663
A WordPress Plugin Specifically for Photographers.
Requires: 3.4 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.2
Last Updated: 2012-8-5
Downloads: 4,548
Each of these plugins would be great choices for your WordPress photography website. However, one clearly is the most trusted over the rest. NextGEN Gallery is soon going to hit 6 million downloads, which is pretty crazy for a WordPress gallery plugin. In addition, many WordPress portfolio themes are supporting the plugin with integration and styling.
There are also many WordPress photography themes with built-in gallery control, if you decided to not use a plugin.
What WordPress gallery plugin do you use on your website and why?
Thanks for reading
The WordPress community is filled with thousands of photography website templates. Some must be paid for, however the majority are free.
Photographers are looking for the same things: beautiful design, home or landing page, blogging, gallery control, and the ability to sell works.
Features of photography website templates include:
So how about we get right to it, shall we?
Viewfinder
As you see, there are endless possibilities of WordPress themes for photographers. So the question is – which will you pick?
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