Originally Posted by
Frank Petronio
I'm considering redesigning my website around a WordPress portfolio template and I'm looking for:
- Good examples of successful commercial individual photographer websites done using WordPress
- A developer who is expert at doing them
Things I value are:
- W3C compliance
- Large images and pages that scale to fit larger 2400-pixel monitors
- Non-Flash
- Photo galleries with order, sorting, caption, control
- Permalinks on each image with alt tags
- Overall SEO-friendliness
- Good Tablet and Smart Phone versions on the fly
- Simple, easy web-based updating
- Persistent, Consistent Navigation
- My concern over WordPress is that it seems like it gets attacked a lot and updating seems arduous. Convince me that if I forget to update it that I am still secure or show me some sort of plan for minimizing my exposure.
I have simple, low-key and minimalistic branding. I want a very simple, probably horizontal scrolling interface with captions showing all of the time. I want small navigation arrows top and bottom and I want to navigate forward and backward by simply clicking on the image too. I also want viewers to see a small indication of progress, like "image 9 out of 20" along with all these navigation choices. I want to see the navigation and branding even when I am in the middle of the scrolling. When the viewer gets to the end, image #20, the next click should bounce it back to #1.
Even though I sound like an ideal client for them, so far neither LiveBooks or A Photo Folio can do that correctly, their menus lag and hide cursors, I think their interfaces suck once I really demo them. I haven't seen a good Index Exhibit site either btw. There are good aspects in all of these but none really do it all.
I want to have five 20-image galleries as horizontal scrolls but I am open to hearing how many and what quantity of images are optimal. I have hundreds of images, I do not want to show them all, but I think about 100 total is enough for someone who is really trying to understand my work.
I definitely want horizontal-scrolling images and I want multiple ways to navigate. I don't want my cursor disappearing or lagging like a lot of sites.
- I want a simple blog (and archive), about, and contact pages. I actually think Tumblr is a great blogging platform and might opt for that.
While I'm here asking, I am also looking for the best and most friendly way to present passworded private galleries of work (generated from Lightroom or CS5) and to password-protect image delivery folders.
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I think this would be a valuable discussion to have right here, open and transparent. If you want to contact me directly and pitch me on anything you can, but you should have a really solid photographer's website that you've done that proves to me you know what you're doing and speak my language. I do not want to deal with people who have not yet done a good website and I will ignore them, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings so make sure you're up to the task and you "get it" before you waste any time.
I did my current website (frankpetronio.com) in 1995 and it has served me well. I supplemented it with a Dripbook site (frankpetronio.net) to present more galleries. What I want to do now is to make a single .com site with larger photos and a minimalistic white presentation -- and make the blog aspect secondary, more for news than posting something everyday like I was doing for so long. I Do Not Want to be the client you learn on.
I also don't want to spend 20 hours importing the old Moveable Type blog into Wordpress. Some things just move on and fade away.
Budget is limited of course but I want to do things right when I do them. At the same time, I am not in any particular hurry, everything I have is working fine. I mainly want to consolidate both websites and have larger images, more reflective of this time than six years ago.
Thanks
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