A new approach for photographers’ websites - integrating Wordpress and Photoshelter
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
I’ve worked on several photographers’ sites (Chris Felver’s for example), and was always frustrated by the off-the-shelf solutions.
So either I built everything by hand (not so easy for the photographer to update themselves), or I was limited in how many text-based pages (news, blog, profile, articles, whatever) I could include.
But now I have a solution - integrating the Wordpress blogging tool and Photoshelter photographers’ archiving, display and sales service to create a dynamic site that looks consistent and makes it very easy for the photographer to upload and organize images and keep a blog going.
I’ve rebuilt my own photography site - Clearing the Vision - partly as an example of what can be done with this approach, and I’m very happy with the result.
Easy to maintain, easy to sell
The main benefit is that under a consistent design you get a site that showcases your work (and your news) while also making it easy to generate revenue either through stock licensing or print sales. So it’s a working part of your business, as well as a marketing tool. And the photographer can do all the day to day updating of images and text without having to know any code or try and track me down myself.
Photoshelter themselves obviously like the approach - they chose the site as one of their 25 or so featured sites in their Tour - since they support 40,000 photographer clients, this is quite a vote of confidence.
I’ve written about it in more detail over on Clearing the Vision, but if you’d like to learn more about how this might work for you, .