Please permit me a quick digression into the world of websites, which is, after all, what I do to support my photography habit. Having a portfolio website is important for photographers. Even if you’re not a professional photographer and can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on the latest and greatest in modern web technology, you need something more than a Flickr account or a blog to point people to when they ask to see your work.
You could easily set up an account with LiveBooks or PhotoShelter, or hire a designer if you’ve got the money or aren’t technically inclined. Many people opt to build their own websites, however, whether it’s from scratch or with the help of a web content management system. One very popular web CMS is called WordPress; it’s the software I use to run this site and many of the sites I’ve built for photographer friends over the years. I’ve created a WordPress theme that has everything you need to put together a basic portfolio website in about 10 minutes:
WordPress is customized through template files that control the way your website looks. What I have found is that there are plenty of portfolio themes out there already, but they’re all way too flashy for my taste. I’ve found it hard in the past to recommend WordPress to photographer friends because I knew that it was going to take a lot of work to create a site that is clean, attractive, and easy to use.
The goal in building this theme was to create a solid jumping off point; you can use it as-is or customize it to your liking. It’s as basic as you can get: a homepage slideshow, easy-to-create project pages, and additional pages to provide whatever extra information you need. It’s got a built-in blogging system, of course. It’s easy to install and update, and not too hard to customize if you know a little bit of HTML and CSS.
So feel free to give it a spin. I’d love to know what you think!
I share your preference to non-flashy simple sites for showcasing photography. I like to see a site that is not unlike the experience someone might have when viewing photos in a physical gallery. Your theme looks like it does this very very well. I am downloading now and will play around with it. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
Nice work. Looks greaty.
or just great
Brilliant.
I was only discussing photographer websites the other day with my business partner. It seems so many people do it so badly – when clean and simple is definitely the way forward. Templates like this are great and should help eliminate those bad sites where one has to hover over a thumbnail and click quickly before it disappears in to the abyss! Thanks.
Wonderful Work, Dalton – I've been working with students to help them learn wordpress for their sites for a while and having options like this are really perfect.
I try to convince people that it's important to have control over their content and something that's easy to manage and also easy to get into deeper (like wordpress) is ideal for a photographer.
Thanks Ian – that's exactly the kind of thing I hoped this theme would be good for. It's perfectly fine to use as-is, but hopefully it's even more powerful as a tool for people to build on and learn from.
definitely.
The clean design helps a lot too. It appeals instantly to people like me who prefer things simple, but also seems to offer customization at first glance by being such a blank slate – something that more visually complicated themes don't seem to present as easily.
Well done Dalton. I have been giving thought to switching over to to WP from my current pixelpost template for my site i even have a big how-to HTML/CSS book sitting on my shelf collecting dust for when i decide to bite the bullet.
I will try and go ahead and give a shot with this template.
Hmm, tempting, although I know nothing about html or css. Could you disply gifs on this? Video?
I don't see why not. You don't really need to know too much code to start using wordpress. It's actually not a bad way to learn if you're willing to be patient, tweak, and see what happens.
This particular template relies on WordPress's built-in image functions – it would probably work for gifs, I'm not sure how well that would translate to video. I am thinking about adding different gallery types (contact sheet, thumbnails, etc) which might be more suited to video.
The nice thing about WordPress is that it is pretty much infinitely customizable, but, as Ian says, a little bit of patience and a willingness to delve in is required.
We'll see if I can get some of that here soon. Thanks for the answers!
Aw, patience and time, you elude me so…
I'd love to check out some sites that use this theme. Please be sure to post some here as you become aware of them.
This is nice. A bit like Indexhibit with the added benefit of a built in blog engine.
Indexhibit was definitely an inspiration. I personally like WordPress more, but I think either one would work just fine for someone looking to set up a basic website.
plus all the millions of plugins out there – many could be tweaked or useful behind the scenes.
Indexhibit is not bad as templates go – it's simple at least, inspired by and part of a general trend towards easy side nav. Definitely better than a lot of other starting level options out there.
Oh yeah, without a doubt, plugins are great. It’s so easy to add a contact list, mailing list, search engine optimization, analytics, etc. I have a whole bunch of them going.
This is great Dalton – very nice uncluttered theme. Can I make a suggestion/observation? I like the click-through set-up on the individual image pages: for ease of use it helps to be able to keep your mouse in the same place while you click through the images, and also to have image numbers so you know where you are in the project – and your theme does both nicely. What I miss, though, is having access to a thumbnail gallery of all the shots in each project (this is something that's also missing from the basic Indexhibit sites). Thumbnail galleries give readers a sense of the overall project, and also allow them to move quickly to individual images if they want to without having to scroll through lots of other images first.
So my ideal set-up would be: clicking on a project name on the left takes you first to a thumbnail gallery of the images in that project, and from there you can dip down into the individual image pages. That'd make this theme perfect! I'm not familiar with WordPress, so perhaps this is something that it's straightforward for users to set up on their own. Anyway – thanks again for the effort on the new theme.
Thanks for the feedback James. I have considered adding a thumbnail template to the theme as well. I don't have a lot of time to focus on this at the moment, but I will see if I can work it in at some point.
James – is this the sort of thing you're looking for?
http://joereynoldsphotography.com/projects/chatta...
Yes, that’s it! (I think I might go for larger thumbnails, though. If I was being really picky.) It looks like a tweak to one of the standard Indexhibit options. As someone who doesn’t know a lot about coding/databases/php, Indexhibit seems kind of complicated, but maybe I just need to get in there and get my hands dirty.
I am going to try this out tonight. Thank you so much!
Can anyone guide me to the steps I would need to do for the following?
I have my blog on my main site right now at my www address. I would like to install this theme there instead and move the blog to /blog. But, I don't want to use this themes blog, but rather my existing WordPress blog at /blog.
I'm a bit unclear on how I would accomplish this. Thanks in advance if anyone has suggestions!
Frank, Hopefully this tutorial here will help you: http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
If you move that installation and then do a new one at your main domain, I think it would work fine.
Thanks for that, Ian. That sounds about right to me.
I shall give this a go for sure. many thanks. It may be suitable for my wife's watercolour work also. . .
All I need to do now is learn how to use it. . .
Your work is part of the reason why i just bought a MF camera from ebay. . . Lee Friedlander is most of the other part of the reason
best,
Jon
Jon, I'm glad to hear that you've made the leap to medium format. Best of luck!
Thanks! I think I shall need some luck
re the WordPress thing, it seems my broadband SP hosting package does not allow SQL stuff at the price point I am at . . . bloody irritating! I shall email them to double check but from the website it looks like they don't.
Jon