Website design

[Mike Anderson]

I want to avoid Microsoft and Adobe. No Flash.

I have php, mysql, postgres and am thinking of Ajax and jquery.

I agree avoid Flash. And I also agree that WordPress is a good inexpensive option. Check with your hosting company to see if WordPress is included in the service, it often is built into the package (look around the control panel of the hosting service to see if there's anything called "WordPress").

I'd find a starving student who has some photographic/visual sensibilities help you with this.

...Mike

[photobymike]

APPLE mobile me and Iweb. simple easy and fast ... basic

http://www.mikepic.com

[paulr]

Interesting thread. Are there any good sites out there on how to customize wordpress (must be web-tard friendly)?

[Richard Mahoney]

Apart from aesthetics and usability -- from the perspective of the admin (you) and the user (your client) -- you should also be considering the system architecture, especially how it will perform under load and how it can be scaled. This may seem unimportant but the inadequacies of many popular -- e.g. PHP based -- systems become apparent when a site has to support large numbers of simultaneous users, all, say, wanting to download your splendid images If one is serious I really would recommend a decent `industrial' system built using Python/Zope or Java. Possibilities include:

CPS -- http://cps-cms.org (Nuxeo)

Silva -- http://www.infrae.com/products/silva (Infrae)

Nuxeo -- http://www.nuxeo.com/ (Nuxeo) -- For the really serious (possibly a consortium of photographers wanting to manage and market a large amount of content)

These aren't toys and there is a decent learning curve but long term these types of systems will save you a great deal of time and money. You should also be carefully choosing your hardware and network infrastructure. A crowd such as Joyent may be worth considering:

Joyent -- http://www.joyent.com/


This may seem a little unnecessary at present but it is best to begin with the assumption that your business will experience and will need to gracefully accomodate rapid growth.


Kind regards,

Richard

[engl]

There are sites with millions of daily page views powered by WordPress, being PHP based is not going to be a limitation for a photography showcase site.

[Frank Petronio]

I am not a web developer but I used to manage web projects and work at as a CD at what was called a "dot.com"... and while I understand the pride one takes in "rolling their own" I can't help but think you could be up and rolling with a very clean and easy to use (and update) website using LiveBooks, DripBooks, or one of their rapidly improving competitors.

Their prices have come down, they are very search engine friendly, they pop out html and mobile version automagically, they have a lot of good features and services. And because so many of the best pros already use them, their canned navigation is pretty wildly accepted (whether you use thumbnails or scrolls or Flash or whatever) so I doubt you could do a better gallery and navigation from scratch. It just isn't worth your time.

Is there anything you want to do that they can't do better? I kind of doubt it, I think most photographers with custom sites do a lousy job and it's a knock against them at this point in 2011.

Also I am no security expert at all, but it seems an awful lot of WordPress sites get hacked regularly. I would let friends host their little websites on my service but now tell them not if they are using WP, mostly because they don't update it for security frequently enough.

[paulr]

Does anyone have links to great looking / working photo sites based on wordpress?

[clay harmon]

My site is based on wordpress, Lightroom and the Thesis customizable theme:

www.clayharmon.com

Does anyone have links to great looking / working photo sites based on wordpress?

[cyrus]

A "film reel" on the bottom, which when clicked, shows a larger photo in the center of the screen? Very simple - no Ajax etc required. The bottom part is simply a (inline?) frame which has a horizontal scroll bar. Some simple PHP coding can be used to change the content of one frame by clicking on the content of another frame.

You can use Wordpress as a content management system to update/edit the content but you don't need a plugin to get this effect.

[Mike Anderson]

Does anyone have links to great looking / working photo sites based on wordpress?

If you search for "wordpress photography themes" or "wordpress photography gallery" you'll see there's a whole micro-industry growing around this concept.

I'm no expert in wordpress, I've used it a little bit with good results, but from what I can tell it has that critical mass, inertia, etc. open source, pretty solid and really cheap.

...Mike