Developing WordPress Websites for Photographers - Examples Please

[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.

~~~

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

[jp]

http://www.clouds365.com/ is one wordpress photo site I've been known to visit.

wordpress does get hacked. It's because it's a popular piece of software and because it's complex. Simple html doesn't get hacked the same way, but it doesn't provide the features either. Keeping it fairly up to date (within a couple months) and disabling unneeded features/options/plugins go a long way to keeping things secure. I think they've made lots of improvements in this area and it's history wouldn't prevent me from using it. Most of the other CMSs have had similar histories, so there isn't anything greener on the other side of the fence.

[wmsey]

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.

~~~

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

Wordpress compromises only seem to be a genuine problem if you move WordPress sites to a third party host. If WordPress hosts them they seem as robust as any other CMS. That said, as I read the WordPress EULA, commercial sites are not allowed on their hosting system.

But there are any number of hosting service which are inexpensive and provide automatic WordPress updates. I use DreamHost. No problem with getting behind should there be a flurry of security related update - DreamHost has my permission to up date the site to the latest release.

As for your laundry list... Nobody who is setting up a brand new site should be using Flash. In doing so you alienate millions and millions of mobile users. That seems silly. WordPress takes things one more step with plugins that trap for mobile devices and present a mobile (gesture and finger friendly) version of the site.

As to the rest of the list - you are just going to have to dig in and see if a WordPress site author has written something that picks the most items off the list. You are unlikely to find one that fills all your needs. There is a large number of plug-in's which may help to pick off a few more of your required features.

Lastly, WordPress has hundreds of variations and themes that are free. There is an equal number of themes that are commercial. My experience has the "costs some money" themes may be a better fit for your long list.

You may also want to leave WordPress for the Open Software Gallery software that, again, DreamHost and others will install. The huge advantage with these is that they use a real database on the back end.

WMSEY

[Eric Rose]

Wordpress is easily update-able for new releases, security updates and plugin updates. Wordpress uses a "real" database backend. I host all my clients at siteground.com and find them to be very good and also very economical.

[jp]

If you need a software person and don't get what you want with personal recommendations, I'd suggest guru.com to match you up with a programmer. I've found programmers for various projects on there, and it can be pretty affordable.

[SeanEsopenko]

I'm a full time web developer and I threw up a wordpress site for my personal stuff out of laziness. My wife operates her retail business with a wordpress site and was hacked a few times due to running on a shared host. Once we moved her to a dedicated server (perk of working for an isp) the hacking disappeared. She updates her wordpress religiously, though, which is very important.

I've started on the infancy of an open source, Django based portfolio website tailored for artists. I'm finally at the point where a blog isn't enough and going to need a proper portfolio site in about 6-10 months that's easy to navigate without the confusion of a blog. I don't like flash based sites and I didn't want to pay to host my portfolio somewhere.

If anybody is savy with python and django they can join in if they want. It's hosted at Git Hub (https://github.com/sesopenko/Esopenko-Photo) but keep in mind it's very infant with about 5-6 half-evenings of work on it so far. I'm ditching Galleria so the code base is going to change a lot soon.

Eventually it'll have a means to easily fill in details for a CV and a "news" portion (simplified blog) to announce stuff to clients and/or patrons. I'm a big fan of Django, btw ;)

But unfortunately I don't think this would be ready when you need it. I'm not quite in a rush to get my own portfolio site going so it's a casual project at the moment. But I saw that there are no open source solutions out there for artists to host their content that's operating on current web technology so I decided to step in and make one. Besides, once it's ready, if somebody paid me $120 per hour to deploy it I'd be happy :)

[ROL]

I'm not a "successful commercial photographer" and I'm guessing you won't like my site either. Frank(ly), your exhaustive list of needs is way to long for me to cross–reference. But if you care to, you may look my on "About" page, where at the bottom I have a link to the wordpress–like gallery specific software I've been running for over 2 years, without incident. I always provide reference links in my posts, but in this case, you'll have to work for it. (Hint: use the pull down under my pseudonym)

[r.e.]

It appears that what you want is:

1. Static about page
2. Static contact page
3. News page, maybe using Tumblr, that will be updated occasionally
4. Gallery that meets specific criteria, including, presumably for clients, password protection for selected images
5. Attractive presentation regardless of processing power and screen size (personal computer, tablet, phone)

Sounds like you need an experienced Wordpress coder who can do 4 and 5, items 1-3 being dead simple. I'm not sure why you would want to use Wordpress as a vehicle to present images on devices of varying power/screen size, which is what this exercise seems to come down to, but presumably you have your reasons.

[Ari]

I'm not sure why you would want to use Wordpress as a vehicle to present images on devices of varying power/screen size, which is what this exercise seems to come down to, but presumably you have your reasons.

Could you provide any alternatives?
I was looking at Wordpress as well, it's pretty easy to set up a blog with photos, but a well-functioning website, clean and easy to navigate, is another story (for me, at least).

[r.e.]

Ari,

Wordpress is first and foremost a blogging platform on which you can also serve up images. If that's what you want, it's fine, as are any one of a number of other blogging platforms.

As I read Frank's specifications, that is not what he has in mind. His site will first and foremost serve up galleries of images, and in addition have an about page, a contact page and occasional news updates. Of those functions, the only one that has anything to do with blogging is the news update feature, and he is talking about using Tumblr for that, in which case he will be using Wordpress to do things that are secondary to its raison d'être. Personally, I think that Wordpress is a cumbersome, bloated way to achieve what he wants, but Frank has a fair bit of experience with content management systems and no doubt he has his reasons.

That said, if I wanted to set up a site with these objectives, my priorities would be:

1. site must serve up galleries containing about 100 large images, with password protect for client images
2. site must serve up the images (the large ones or a separate set?) efficiently and attractively to relatively low power/small screen tablets and smart phones (I would consider this extremely important)
3. site must serve up occasional news updates (query whether a content management system is even needed for this)
4. site must serve up static about and contact pages (this requires really basic coding).

I think that this is mostly about (a) overall site design and (b) creating/coding, or finding off the shelf, a gallery platform that meets his specs and that serves images efficiently and attractively to relatively low power/small screen devices.

[aluncrockford]

You might want to take a look at this as an alternative,

http://www.indexhibit.org/

[Jim Cole]

You can also take a look at Stockbox Photo for use as a gallery/shopping engine. I had my site built around this engine and it works quite smoothly and is very robust.

You can check it out here: http:\\Stockboxphoto.com

[Peter De Smidt]

You might check out http://www.photocrati.com/

[Frank Petronio]

The only reason I asked about Word Press was to see if somebody had a good gallery template already done for one. I haven't seen anything satisfactory to me yet, but I'm not sure I've seen a really perfect modern gallery yet.

I want obvious previous and next arrows on the top and bottom, plus make each image clickable, plus have persistent captions, plus an indication of how far you are within the gallery (like 19 out 20). So far I haven't seen anyone doing it as simple and straight-forward as that sounds.

I admit to being confused when I look at a Flash LiveBooks site and see their Flash galleries then an iPhone and tablet version and a SEO-friendly html version too... seems like a huge headache and $$$ to do all that from scratch.

[Tom Kershaw]

Frank,

http://forbesconrad.com/ - this site displays the galleries very cleanly. However, it appears to be somewhat of a custom build, not the result of a simple template or theme.

Tom

[Mike Anderson]

...make each image clickable...

What do you want to happend when someone clicks on an image?

Sometimes a non-thumbnail image brings up the next image in the sequence, sometimes it enlarges the image, sometimes it reverts back to the gallery view, sometimes clicking on the right side goes forward and left side goes back. Sometimes it simply goes to a page with only that (same size) image on it.

I know you've been giving this some thought and surveying potential solutions, so what should clicking on an image do?

...Mike

[clay harmon]

I am using wordpress for a CMS on my website. The approach I am taking is to embed Lightroom HTML galleries into static pages using one of several plugins that essentially use an iframe to put the gallery into the page. It makes it very easy to add content in the form of entire galleries and allows me to use knowledge I already have in using Lightroom. The technical blog part of my website details some of the things I did. I don't think it looks particularly 'bloggy', which is the issue with a lot of wordpress sites, IMO

It is located right here (http://www.clayharmon.com)

[chacabuco]

What about this WordPress theme (http://madebyraygun.com/wordpress/themes/portfolio-theme/) from a forum member?

[dalton]

Hi Frank,
I'm the developer of Portfolio2: http://madebyraygun.com/wordpress/themes/portfolio-theme/

And also a large format photographer: http://daltonrooney.com/

We sell Portfolio2 as a WordPress theme, and also provide customization services based on it. The theme has several different portfolio layout formats and is clean and easy to style. I highly endorse WordPress as a platform for just about any kind of website. If you're looking at the Portfolio2 theme page, be sure to click "Example Sites", you'll see what kind of customizations people are able to do with it. I've developed a lot of sites for photographers, most aren't on our website but I'd be glad to share them privately.

Feel free to get in touch! http://madebyraygun.com/about

Cheers,
Dalton

[Jan Pedersen]

Dalton was very helpful when i after years of thinking about it finally desided to make a site.
Although it is very simple, it was all i wanted as i have no need or desire (Nor skills) to sell anything on the site.
I would like to expand mine to have subgalleries in the near future but for now it works well.

[clay harmon]

I looked at Dalton's theme, and it looks like a really good option for a hassle free approach to getting a functional website quickly. Unless you enjoy hacking around with HTML, CSS, php and Javascript, I think this looks like a real winner. Sure is priced right.

[cjbecker]

I have been working on mine for a little bit now. It started as a complex site and i customized it to my liking through css. http://www.clarkbeckerphotography.com (www.clarkbeckerphotography.com)

[Ari]

I finished my website, custom-built on Weebly (my brother helped a lot).
I was avoiding WP because I heard that it's easy to hack (not sure if it's true).

www.aritapiero.com

It was free and easy to do; the Weebly name is nowhere to be seen, as I own my domain and was able to transfer it from Weebly.
Templates are not very good, but easily customizable

[cjbecker]

I finished my website, custom-built on Weebly (my brother helped a lot).
I was avoiding WP because I heard that it's easy to hack (not sure if it's true).

www.aritapiero.com

It was free and easy to do; the Weebly name is nowhere to be seen, as I own my domain and was able to transfer it from Weebly.
Templates are not very good, but easily customizable

Thats a great looking site. I have been on your site before. We are kinda going off the same idea.

[Ari]

Thats a great looking site. I have been on your site before. We are kinda going off the same idea.

Thanks, CJ.

[adonis_abril]

Have you considered ZenPhoto gallery?

I built mine using the simple engine...

www.thedynamiclight.com

I then used the same template to build my blogging site

http://thedynamiclight.com/blog/