Your own photography website without coding

The question many photographers pose…

As I say on my home page, “Your business needs a website.” Why? Quick, furtive glances at people’s laptops, tablets, and phones at the local Starbucks…es (five reside in my small town) show games, YouTube…and people looking at business websites. Is your photography business on the Web? And I don’t mean on Flickr, where lots of people browse, but few photographers can stand out when it receives thousands of photos per minute. I mean your own site with your own domain name that you control and promote yourself.

Many options exist, from simple free blogs to a site customized to you by a Web developer, which is what I do for people. An easy-to-see example of this is this very site that I designed and coded as a WordPress theme.

WordPress is the path I take you in a four-part video series I’ve published on YouTube called “Your own photography website without coding.” This series is an answer to the question: “What service should I use to build my photography website?” I don’t mean WordPress the free blogging service — I mean WordPress the CMS, a very flexible and powerful software platform that can drive any website you can imagine.

Why WordPress? After some not-so-satisfying experiments with CMSs like Joomla and Drupal, I found WordPress’s CMS model to be the perfect combination of power, customizability, and ease-of-use. So enthusiastic have I become for WordPress that every single one of the last several websites I’ve designed use WordPress as the backend. I think it’s a great solution for photographers to put themselves on the Web with a great quality website for very little cost.

You can watch this series to start a website from my YouTube channel, or you can watch them right here.

Part 1 covers different options you have for hosting your website, including WordPress. It answers the question, “What is WordPress,” then begins the WordPress path by describing different hosting options, and how to get a hosting service that’s suitable for a WordPress-driven website.

You install a complete, default WordPress website in Part 2, visible to the world, though not (yet) customized to you.

In Part 3, I show the way around the WordPress dashboard for administering the site, such as creating blog posts with photos, pages and their menus, and WordPress themes. You start to have a custom-looking site by the end of this part.

I close out this series by finishing the example site with a home-page slideshow and an image gallery, I customize the menu, clean up the thumbnails, and finally discuss Search Engine Optimization.

In this series, I use an example theme which you’re free to use for your own photography website. You can download this theme that I call “CleanPhoto” from my gallery shop for free. Just “purchase” it for $0 and you’ll receive an email with a download link for the theme.

Lastly, you can run through the slide presentation I used in this series below.

I hope that, from this series, you’ll be able to create your own photography website, or that you’ll have the knowledge to use other solutions.

To comment on this post, see this post on Facebook. Thank you!