Wordpress

Hi Guys,

I searched a little here and most people seemed to be on Smugmug or Zenfolio. I don't like the idea that I have to pay a monthly fee or my website is gone.

Therefore I was going to buy a wordpress theme. Any arguments against it? Any recommendation before I start investing time and money?

My 2 favorites are



Both look great and have tons of options.

I am using at the moment 500px.com as my reference site


Which Wordpress theme do you use and which would you recommend?

For me important:

Password protected area

Beautiful design with full page display

E-Commerce option

Fast and responsive

Customization options

Many pre-designed options

Easy to use (Drag and drop ideally)

Contact page with sth. like "I am not a robot" security

Secure

Beautiful galleries

But don't you still have to pay a monthly fee, just to a hosting company... Unless you are self hosting.

I used photocrati for years. They were very good. Only thing was at the time their themes were not responsive and Google was clamping down on mobile friendly sites.

We now use a theme from thomastoddus for WordPress that we have heavily modified.

Google are going to be penalising non HTTPS sites soon so something to keep in mind too.

Photocrati is responsive now. I am paying 0,99€ in Germany currently per month for hosting with unlimited GB. It was a special offer for 12 month

The hosting company offers HTTPS for a fee. Not sure what it is. Google will definitely do sth. there...

medialinx said:

But don't you still have to pay a monthly fee, just to a hosting company... Unless you are self hosting.

I used photocrati for years. They were very good. Only thing was at the time their themes were not responsive and Google was clamping down on mobile friendly sites.

We now use a theme from thomastoddus for WordPress that we have heavily modified.

Google are going to be penalising non HTTPS sites soon so something to keep in mind too.

Click to expand...

voider said:

Photocrati is responsive now. I am paying 0,99€ in Germany currently per month for hosting with unlimited GB. It was a special offer for 12 month

The hosting company offers HTTPS for a fee. Not sure what it is. Google will definitely do sth. there...

medialinx said:

But don't you still have to pay a monthly fee, just to a hosting company... Unless you are self hosting.

I used photocrati for years. They were very good. Only thing was at the time their themes were not responsive and Google was clamping down on mobile friendly sites.

We now use a theme from thomastoddus for WordPress that we have heavily modified.

Google are going to be penalising non HTTPS sites soon so something to keep in mind too.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Not only is Photocrati responsive, but going from a non-responsive Photocrati theme to its responsive update is merely a matter of selecting "Responsive" in a dropdown and pressing the "Save" button.

Voila! My non-responsive legacy site turned into its mobile-responsive version just like that--I didn't have to change anything else. All my customizations and Wordpress plug-ins like Contact7 rode through it like champions.

As the name suggests, Photocrati has 70 themes designed for image display. You pay one price (varies, if there is sale, between $67 and $99) and have permanent access to all their themes, changeable with a keystroke or two.

Our companies manage web sites for several relatively small businesses, but none of them are e-commerce sites.

And none are photography sites.

That said, some have lots of photographs in them, and some of them are changed frequently. We are about to launch a site that will be changed several times a day.

Cutting to the chase, I'm a firm believer in WIX. It's pricing is very reasonable.

Free, if you don't mind ads on your site. I do not recommend this.

About $150 a year without ads, maybe a little more with advanced e-commerce.

Anyway, pricing is at WIX.com and is probably as straightforward in Germany as it is in Canada.

Our WIX sites are highly modified from WIX themes, since believe strongly that we want to say and show information in our way, not the way someone else predetermined. And they are modified frequently.

I also like WIX because I believe there are actual people who go to work everyday and want to provide excellent service to us.

WIX provides updates and email hints every day, answers questions quickly, and is very reliable.

To me, it is cheap, easy to change, easy to use, and I cannot imagine it not having any feature I may want. But, I note, I do not need some of the photography features like custom printing of files, and shipment of prints (and coffee mugs) to web site visitors.

All that said, one of our staff is developing some kind of Go Daddy site that's tied into Wordpress.

PURPOSE OF THIS NOTE: It is just to let you know that WIX is easy to use, if you end up doing it yourself.

BAK

we use a customised wordpress theme.

pros for wordpress is easy managment... but you need an enormous number of plugins to get some important functionality... so you need a good seo plugin, and a good plugin to optimise ....

the problem with Wordpress is its not fast. it's code heavy and you need to work hard to get decent page load speeds... plus you also need to fine tune and get more plugins if you want to get a effective ssl.

page loads kill photography sites. our video site is faster than our stills site... ( but we are still optimising some images to speed it up...) so the whole big image worpress fabulous site is gonna be a major pita to get a decent load time... and that costs you in seo.

i suspect Drupal is a better option...

the key is a good designer who knows there stuff.

i would suggest before committing that you find sites using the same themes... and test on the Google developers speed test..

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

its a bit of a crude tool, but will highlight areas of concern, and particularly slow sites or themes.

we have both an sSL certificate, and our load times are competitive with our competition, but no where near as fast as I would like.

--
www.pageonephotography.co.uk
Striving hard to be the man that my dog thinks I am.

voider said:

Hi Guys,

I searched a little here and most people seemed to be on Smugmug or Zenfolio. I don't like the idea that I have to pay a monthly fee or my website is gone.

Therefore I was going to buy a wordpress theme. Any arguments against it? Any recommendation before I start investing time and money?

My 2 favorites are

http://www.photocrati.com/

https://themeforest.net/item/oshine-creative-multipurpose-html-template/11698505

Both look great and have tons of options.

I am using at the moment 500px.com as my reference site

https://500px.com/timurophotography

Which Wordpress theme do you use and which would you recommend?

For me important:

Password protected area

Beautiful design with full page display

E-Commerce option

Fast and responsive

Customization options

Many pre-designed options

Easy to use (Drag and drop ideally)

Contact page with sth. like "I am not a robot" security

Secure

Beautiful galleries

Click to expand...

You will need to purchase hosting for any WordPress theme you decide to go with. WordPress also has a learning curve and a certain amount of maintenance required to maintain the website. That said, if you can invest the time to learn and the learning curve isn't that steep, nothing can compare to a WordPress website. I've personally had SmugMug, SquareSpace, and WordPress/Avada websites :0

I went with Photocrati about a year and a half ago. My old websites weren't responsive and were tanking in search engine rankings. Photocrati is responsive now, as others have mentioned. I've been pleased with Photocrati so far. The eCommerce features are great. Tech support is generally prompt when needed. There are occasional quirks with WordPress that make me long for the old Dreamweaver days, but overall I'm content.


- Greg

If you go with an established company like Zenfolio, then you skip the fees for hosting and all that, but you pay an annual fee to Zenfolio. The good news is that they have an excellent system for keeping out the hackers. Zenfolio has all of the features that you need for either a simple gallery or else a commercial gallery.

Although I use Wordpress for another site, that isn't the sole tool that you need. If you try to build your own commercial gallery using Wordpress, then you will have some headaches. If nothing else, Wordpress sites seem to be targeted by the hackers pretty thoroughly these days. So far, there are plenty of defenses. I often get a couple of thousand hacker attempts there per day. Since I rolled my own Wordpress site, I pay an annual hosting fee to some host company.

WIX sent me (and probably a million other people) a note today that it has started a blog for photographers.


I have not looked at the new blog yet.

BAK

NottsPhoto said:

...
page loads kill photography sites. ...

Click to expand...

+1

Always remember: you are asking your web-site visitors to give you one thing we all have in short supply: their time!

It is my contention that site owners encourage their web-designers to produce websites with all kinds of bells and whistles, and never check their logs to see just what percentage of visitors abandon the site just as soon as the first code-heavy slow-loading page is encountered. For most site owners out there, time and money spent on studying the logs is likely to be a better investment than the time and money spent on adding visual attractiveness to the pages.

I had a Wordpress prophoto blog theme site (for many years).

It was simple to use and fast but not responsive. So I had a choice of upgrading to the next version (which caused a few friends headaches) or looking for another theme. I tried one of these super do everything wordpress themes called Ronneby which was so slow and buggy to configure I asked for a refund.


I spent considerable time and switched to GRAV: https://getgrav.org/
It was performing very well out of the box but with some serious effort I now get a google page speed score of 90/100 mobile and 96/100 on desktop. Ironically if I ditched Google analytics it would be a higher score still.

It is incredibly fast loading compared to Wordpress sites, especially on something like an older ipad2. On this desktop I can load 40 bookedmarked posts all at the same time in seconds.

Good luck with your choice,
Andrew

One of my favourite photographers of all time is Stéfan Bourson, and he uses the Timber theme for Wordpress. His website (sbourson.com) is all about the images and the theme presents his work beautifully.

Brian

voider said:

Hi Guys,

I searched a little here and most people seemed to be on Smugmug or Zenfolio. I don't like the idea that I have to pay a monthly fee or my website is gone.

Therefore I was going to buy a wordpress theme.

Click to expand...

This is a false equivalence, and you don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish about this.

The least expensive way to put up a Wordpress site is to get a domain name (annual fee) and a hosting plan so that you have a server to put the site on (monthly or annual fee). Already, you have not escaped the ongoing fees. This might be $10/month if you're lucky. And if you stop paying, no more website for you. (Also, some Wordpress plug-ins like NextGen now have annual fees or else you no longer get updates.)

The only way to not pay for Wordpress hosting is to set up any old PC as a web server and plug it into the wall. Which you can do. But the responsibility will be yours to provide the same level of backup, maintenance, security, and bandwidth handling that a web host normally does at their level of expertise and resources. If this is your livelihood, running your own server may be too risky.

Even if you subscribe to a basic web hosting plan, you have not created the equal of a Zenfolio or Smugmug site. Your Wordpress site at this point is at the lowest service level. It may require some ongoing manual work to keep it up to date, keep it secured, keep hackers from secretly placing malware on your Wordpress site, etc. Every plug-in you install is a potential security hole, so you have to stay on top of those too. A basic hosting plan might also have limits on bandwidth, disk space, or other traffic which could be exceeded if you get a big spike in visitors.

Every server administrator with a clue, complains these days of the massive number of probes coming from China and Russia every day seeking to break into their websites. It requires constant vigilance to avoid being victimized.

You can prevent some of those problems by upgrading your hosting plan or getting a more feature-rich Wordpress-specific hosting plan, or adding services like Wordpress Jetpack Premium/Pro to get to the same service level as a pro site. But that means your annual/monthly fee gets ever closer to the price of one of those photo websites.

One nice thing about the Zenfolios and Smugmugs is that all the responsibility for maintaining server security and managing traffic and demand is on them, because if they don't, their thousands of paying customers will leave. They take care of all those things on their end, so I don't have to, and I sure don't want to or know how. They also constantly maintain their code to stay on top of browser and device compatibility, and have an almost Wordpress-level of customizability (through custom CSS).

I maintain some Wordpress sites too, so I'm not against that. Wordpress is powerful and wonderful and flexible. It's just that you have to be realistic about what you are paying for, and what you are giving up when you think you are saving money. Go with Wordpress if it's the right solution for you, but understand that there are real reasons why paying for a non-Wordpress photo website often works out to be a more cost-effective solution in the big picture.