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Tim Parkin provides an overview of this powerful web development platform
Tim Parkin
Your humble editor, ex-mathematician, A&R for U2, web developer to the Queen, guitarist and general geek-boy.
Other articles by Tim Parkin
We started our series on web design recently and it’s about time we continued. We’re going to take a look at something that a lot of people have been asking recently and that is ‘Wordpress for photographers websites’. I’ve been developing websites since 1994 (my first was a website to coordinate a collaborative research project I worked on whilst working at Manchester University) and over the last decade have incubated, grown and sold an Internet marketing and development consultancy. Over this time I’ve seen WordPress emerge and go from a flawed blogging platform to quite a comprehensive content management system. I still do some web development and have previously used a web framework that myself and a colleague developed. However, in the last year I’ve started to use wordpress for nearly all my web development work and have started to migrate my existing websites to it.
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Very interesting article and approach Tim.
I also recently moved from using a fully bespoke coded website to adopting WordPress. My two reasons for doing so was ease of updating and the higher visibility WordPress sites have. It has actually surprised me how much visibility I gained with my site since the change, including various entries in daily online papers. Initially sceptical of the change, I am now fully converted.
I must have a more thorough read into the details above later, but a couple of observations from my initial read.
- The one post to one image relationship and the promised future ‘plugin’ would provide a sound basis for a gallery, but may hinder those that want more of a photo blog, with a small set of photos included within a single post.
- How do you safeguard your ‘coding’ from being lost with an upgrade of WordPress or a plugin? E.g. if a WordPress update replaces the functions.php file with a new one, your changes to this file would automatically be lost.
Yes I try to tell people how much SEO can be improved by using wordpress with some good themes and a couple of SEO plugins.
1) The gallery wouldn’t stop people using the blog functionality – it is completely separate and so they can live side by side.
2) I cheat and create a clone of any theme I use and then use ‘meld’ to compare any future changes and cherry pick what I want from them. Typically I keep an eye out for security changes only though. If I want extra features I’ll try to find a plugin that does it. Still learning though – here is another way – http://venutip.com/content/right-way-override-theme-functions
Now I am even more interested in your suggested approach. When did you say your plugin would be available to us (for free of course)?
I have adopted the same approach as you in respect of safeguarding updates, but the ‘other way’ to override theme functions seems much smarter. I may adopt that approach on a rainy day myself.
We’re going to try to get a simple free version sorted out – might not have a wizzy interface though…
I know that I’m a bit late to this party (i.e. just catching up on all the posts here I haven’t yet got round to reading) but if you’re making changes to a theme directly, you should look at using a child theme. So any pages you want to re-write yourself (such as your image pages), you can write as part of the child theme, but any you don’t, get taken as the default from the parent theme.
I was researching about web design 3 weeks now.My main problem was how to connect galleries,albums,posts.I am really interested about this and I am sure loads of people would like to know how to make a simple gallery with albums.I really like the design of WideRange Galleries but I think they charge a lot.How easy to make something like their templates?
Dimitris Mitrovgenis
Very interesting Tim. I definitely see a potential market for the type of WordPress theme or plug-in you describe. Like others, I have worked with a number of WordPress themes on my website, some better than others, but none of them entirely satisfactory for the reasons you mention. I recently moved from Photocrati (quite good) to Theme Trust’s Reveal theme (see it in action at http://lightexpression.co.uk) which does some nice things with portfolio categories. I also like the fact that is is responsive (ie adjusts automatically to the size of the browser window). With a bit of tweaking, I was able to get it to show titles, camera details, etc for individual images. This extra info helps with SEO, but it still has the drawback you highlight of loading all images onto just one portfolio page. In my case, the trade-off in terms of SEO vs functionality and ease of use was acceptable, as mine is just a personal site and provides enough search engine visibility for my needs. However, for pros or amateurs wanting to market their work, your approach has a lot of potential. One free plugin I highly recommend is WordPress SEO by Yoast, which is easy to use and improves a standard out-of-the-box WordPress installation. This will have to do me for now, at least until someone finally ‘gets’ what we really need in a photo portfolio theme.
I also use wordpress and in my opinion this is the best engine has ever made. Quite simple to work with it and if you know little about html and how to work with css cant be beter solution for everyone who dreams about own website.
Great thing is still developing and you’ve huge choice of various themes and pugins.
And what is so important: its free.
I really appreciate people who have created it.
Thanks for the tips Tim, it is something I struggle with, to the point that I keep my galleries out of WP and use Lightroom, which “breaks” my site somewhat.
Having seen screen grabs of your WP “backend” (sorry!) before, I covet it a lot
I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one that would be prepared to put their hand in their pocket if it were developed as a retail plugin.
We’re definitely looking at some sort of version of this as a plugin at some point. Something to make it easier for non-programmers to use.
Hi,
Great tips and detail Tim, might have to take a closer look. My current site is hand-coded HTML/PHP/SQL (yes I locked myself in a room!), and I am pretty pleased with it really. It’s evolved gradually and, like you, at the time I put it together website templates like WordPress etc didn’t really provide the gallery functionality that I was looking for.
Looks like things have matured quite a lot now though, so perhaps time do some more digging. Being able to add new trends as they come out (e.g Google+) via plugins rather than more time in my locked room is attractive!
Very interesting article Tim and nice tips. Like others, I’ve been looking for some time to move my website to WordPress because of its SEO properties and the ease of updates. I have narrowed down my selection to Themetrust (especially the Filtered theme) and the Landscape theme from Studiopress, the latter because of the Genesis framework. So, thanks for providing some direction towards specific themes and providers.
Another excellent article Tim. I’m just developing a new website for the first time in WordPress, so on the learning curve. It certainly is much quicker than my previous work in Dreamweaver! I looked first at Elegant Themes, but decided on Photocrati due to the eCommerce requirement to sell images. This seemed easier than modifying through plugins or HTML coding. It remains to be seen how this will work in practice as I suspect it will be more limited than I want. A big plus for Photocrati was that I had a problem with my SQL settings and didn’t have the knowledge as to how to sort them out. I dealt with Photocrati support and they were excellent unlike my web hosting providers!
I think articles such as this are just what many of us want and need, so keep up the good work. I’ll let you know when I complete my site and you can use it as an example if you want to.
John
I tried WordPress, but found it a but too bulky. Not everyone has broadband (I’m reminded of this constantly at work) and I like to have my pages stripped to the bone code-wise. This approach also helps with SEO. After finding out how to remove all the WordPress bits I wasn’t interested in I found I was back to hand coding everything, making WordPress pointless for me.
Textpattern is a good way to go if you are up for some hand coding. I’ve still some bits and bobs to add in, like IPTC data, and better photograph structuring, but my site’s coming along nicely now thanks to Textpattern and Slideshowpro (despite my hatred for Adobe Flash).
From some of the comments above I’d suggest buying a book for coding WordPress. That will set you in the right direction regards Child themes etc. If it doesn’t then you need to buy a different one!
I’ll keep an eye on your progress to see if I can be turned. It’d be nice to finally have an all in one solution, rather than bits of this and bits of that.
Best,
Steven Donaldson.
http://stevendonaldson.co.uk
I can recommed ‘Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog’ by Thord Daniel Hedengren.
Seconded.
Interesting article. I am currently in the process of rebuilding my sites from scratch and have gone down the WP route. I reviewed the photocrati options, but thoughts the galleries and themes were too basic and a bit limiting in their style. I also looked at GPP, which doesn’t have an ecommerce option at the moment for galleries, but will soon I hear.
I am no expert coder, in fact I’m not even a beginner coder, but after a week of watching videos and trial/error it all began to clear, CSS and WP is not quite the mystery it once was.
Very keen to see your solution develop Tim
I find the WordPress Blog side of things a great piece of complementary material to my website – the fact that you can publish a quick post from my blackberry is very appealing as I find similar posts on facebook/twitter get lost very quickly.
a quick link for any feedback or followers
http://johnirvineimages.wordpress.com/
This looks to be the solution I’ve been looking for. Using wordpress, I’m currently having to add individual pages, and add the code manually to each page to give me a consistent layout, including picture, titles, location, next/previous buttons. Being able to define a template to do this, with a few fields to populate would be ideal! Even better if it was coded into a plug-in!
Elliot
http://www.elliothook.co.uk
Hi Tim
Changing over to a WordPress based website is something I have wanted to do for ages but as yet haven’t found a good ecommerce based gallery. I’m not adverse to doing a bit of programming to achieve the look I want but I’m not prepared to shut myself away for weeks on end writng code. Just wondered if you had got any further with your developements I would be very interested.
Kate