Creating A Photography Website

Tah

Tah

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Edit My Images
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Hi Ladies and Gents

I hope you all have decided whether you will be staying in the EU or thinking its best to leave (personally I'm going to choose to remain.)

Anyway back to photography. I wonder if anyone can help in recommending the best theme for creating a photography website through wordpress?

I understand the industry is hard to become a fully-fledged photographer but I would love to make in roads to make my dream a reality. At the minute my photography is based on street photography and architectural shots around London. I have done a couple of projects which I found an amazing experience working with clients but I want to take it to another level now and include a blog rather than showing a majority of my work on Instagram.

I hope you can be of great help to me. YouTube hasn't been to great so wanted to ask the people
 
Hi Tah,

This is coming from my enthusiast perspective, a good resource I found was Themeforest if you want to pay for a theme. They run at about £45 and you get a bit of support if you have any issues setting them up and the rating system lets you spot the better ones. There's plenty of free themes about too if you Google form them.

I'm not sure there is any one best photography theme though, it comes down to what you want to achieve with your website. There's a lot of great advice on this forum about that and some of the experts here can offer better guidance on content / SEO etc.
 
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Hi Tah,

I'm pretty much in the same position as you photography wise (although have voted to leave the EU!) and have been looking recently at setting up my own website. After hours of looking through templates I've decided to run with Photocrati, which is a Wordpress theme and has a number of template choices. I want to run a blog as well as have client galleries (I'm picking up bits and pieces of work here and there now) and ecommerce (for later on) so Photocrati suits me for what I need and one of their templates has the 'look' that I want, although I will tweak it to make it 'mine'. I've set up my domain name through 123reg and am about to sign up with TSOhost for hosting.

A lot of the wedding photographers on here use ProPhoto. Photodeck has some beautiful templates but they are (for me) expensive.

Anyway Matt has good advice IMO and I agree that it comes down to what you want from a site. I found it helped to write out and draw (very badly) what I wanted my site to look like. There is an awesome amount of advice on this forum and I've found it invaluable.
 
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Matt-P said:
Hi Tah,

This is coming from my enthusiast perspective, a good resource I found was Themeforest if you want to pay for a theme. They run at about £45 and you get a bit of support if you have any issues setting them up and the rating system lets you spot the better ones. There's plenty of free themes about too if you Google form them.

I'm not sure there is any one best photography theme though, it comes down to what you want to achieve with your website. There's a lot of great advice on this forum about that and some of the experts here can offer better guidance on content / SEO etc.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your advice. I found it a great help. If anyone else wishes to provide their opinion, ill be most grateful.
 
Carol S said:
Hi Tah,

I'm pretty much in the same position as you photography wise (although have voted to leave the EU!) and have been looking recently at setting up my own website. After hours of looking through templates I've decided to run with Photocrati, which is a Wordpress theme and has a number of template choices. I want to run a blog as well as have client galleries (I'm picking up bits and pieces of work here and there now) and ecommerce (for later on) so Photocrati suits me for what I need and one of their templates has the 'look' that I want, although I will tweak it to make it 'mine'. I've set up my domain name through 123reg and am about to sign up with TSOhost for hosting.

A lot of the wedding photographers on here use ProPhoto. Photodeck has some beautiful templates but they are (for me) expensive.

Anyway Matt has good advice IMO and I agree that it comes down to what you want from a site. I found it helped to write out and draw (very badly) what I wanted my site to look like. There is an awesome amount of advice on this forum and I've found it invaluable.
Click to expand...

Thank you. Your advice is also invaluable. It sometimes good to know you're facing in the right direction. Good luck with the development of your website. Would love to see it once completed
 
Tah,
I recently set up a simple photography website for myself using Wordpress and the 'Enfold' theme.
I looked around and tried a few free ones but eventually settled on Enfold:
as I didn't have to use extra plugins (only one I'd likely want to add is woocommerce if I decided to sell images...and the theme plugin work seemlessly if I did take that route).
it was easier to design the pages the way I wanted them rather than relying on formatting that was fixed by the theme
the inbuilt editor was easy to use (I don't want to spend hours maintaining a website!).
it's reactive

Enfold isn't free but for the ease of use I was happy to spend a little bit of money.

Not suggesting you should use the same theme but I suspect my reasons for choosing it would tend to apply to quite a few of the paid themes versus free ones.

For info I use freeparking for domain management and host1plus for hosting - I've used both of these for years so it was easy enough to create a Wordpress website within the hosting I already have.

Not done much with the site as yet but there is a slideshow, galleries and a blog (easy enough to add other things or rearrange what I have done so far)
 
Hi Tah,

I recently revamped my Wordpress site and found that it is better to operate a two site solution.

I use Wordpress to run my portfolio and blog but opted for off site hosting for the image archive. PhotoDeck was the solution I opted for and while it is pricey, it offers a lot of flexability and a decent amount of storage. A lot of people said to me that I was crazy running two sites but the load times on my portfolio are important to me and without going for a dedicated server, hosting the client side stuff and e-commerce would have killed load times.

I look at it as my shop front, which needs to be all nice and shiny. That is a Wordpress site running Pitch theme though I have customised the theme quite heavily. It took me a week of solid work to get it running right but the ThemeForest support was helpful, if a little slow to respond.

PhotoDeck was simplicity in itself to set up but I didn't want all the bells and whistles for that. I see this as my warehouse, just a place to bung thousands of photos for the day they are needed. It currently holds 15k high res photos and can handle almost any amount of concurrent connections I need. All the photos are stored on Amazon Secure so there is little risk of data loss. A year of PhotoDeck costs me about £300 because I have had to expand the basic 60Gb of storage but its money well spent in my opinion. You can upload via a plugin straight from lightroom and the e-commerce bit is completely hands off. It takes the orders, takes the money and then just zaps any orders for printed products straight off to OVI to be manufactured and posted to client.

You can take a look at mine on www.theimageteam.com for the portfolio site and archive.theimageteam.com for the archive.
 
The Image Team said:
Hi Tah,

I recently revamped my Wordpress site and found that it is better to operate a two site solution.

I use Wordpress to run my portfolio and blog but opted for off site hosting for the image archive. PhotoDeck was the solution I opted for and while it is pricey, it offers a lot of flexability and a decent amount of storage. A lot of people said to me that I was crazy running two sites but the load times on my portfolio are important to me and without going for a dedicated server, hosting the client side stuff and e-commerce would have killed load times.

I look at it as my shop front, which needs to be all nice and shiny. That is a Wordpress site running Pitch theme though I have customised the theme quite heavily. It took me a week of solid work to get it running right but the ThemeForest support was helpful, if a little slow to respond.

PhotoDeck was simplicity in itself to set up but I didn't want all the bells and whistles for that. I see this as my warehouse, just a place to bung thousands of photos for the day they are needed. It currently holds 15k high res photos and can handle almost any amount of concurrent connections I need. All the photos are stored on Amazon Secure so there is little risk of data loss. A year of PhotoDeck costs me about £300 because I have had to expand the basic 60Gb of storage but its money well spent in my opinion. You can upload via a plugin straight from lightroom and the e-commerce bit is completely hands off. It takes the orders, takes the money and then just zaps any orders for printed products straight off to OVI to be manufactured and posted to client.

You can take a look at mine on www.theimageteam.com for the portfolio site and archive.theimageteam.com for the archive.
Click to expand...
I do that direct from Wordpress with the Amazon S3 offload plugin. That way my warehouse is directly integrated with the shop front.
 
I've been slowly putting an online folio together using Koken. See http://koken.me/ for more info.

I installed and set it up on a web host the same as you would Wordpress. Fairly customisable and some nice free themes, as well as a couple of purchasable ones.
They have a plugin to allow purchase of work too. This is at a cost however ($35)
Koken itself is free to setup and install. It's worth a look. I quite like it so far. I didn't get into Wordpress but I know a lot that use it and love it.
 
Visual composer is worth a purchase as well as nextgen galleries for WP alternatively there's divi amongst numerous others :)
 
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