WordPress has made it easy for aspiring photographers to put up their portfolio online. In fact, WordPress almost has everything that anyone wants to create a website whether it is for personal, business or portfolio. If you are a photographer and want to reach a wider audience, you want to put up your portfolio of photos online. You don’t need to hire a developer to create a website for you. In here, you will learn about how you can create your photography portfolio website and publish it online.
Domain and Hosting
In this part, you will learn about how you setup your website through domain and hosting. You will need to setup a domain name that will define the identity of your website online. You’ve seen a lot of them. For example, the domain name of Google is google.com. Yours will define what your photography is all about. Hosting refers to where you are going to put up your website, photos, and many others that you want other people to see. It is like putting your belongings in a house, but it will be open for the public to see. There are a lot of hosting sites you can choose, but you should start with something for beginners, especially ones that provide discounts for first-timers. Don’t worry about having your first time opening up to a hosting site. Most hosting sites provide a tutorial that will guide you where to go. Some of them even provide a guide on where to go next if you are a beginner.
Installing WordPress
After you have found your hosting site, the next step is to install WordPress. It will be easier if you look for a hosting site that already has a quick install option. After you have registered to a hosting site, you will be directed to your cPanel, where all the magic happens to publish your website. Most hosting sites will give you directions where you can find the quick install icon, and they will do the installation for you. Once the installation of the WordPress starts, it will ask you information regarding your website, which is about photography. You will be asked to provide the title of the website, your email, username for admin and much more. Don’t worry about whether you make a mistake. You can still change this information later on or even add more information as you go along with your website. Once you are satisfied with the information you have provided, click on the Install button. Installation is quick, and it will inform you about it. You will be asked to log into your WordPress site using the admin username and password.
Choosing a Theme
WordPress has a lot of pre-made themes. If you have no idea what themes are, it is the design template of your website. WordPress has a default theme which you can certainly use since it is a minimalistic theme. It is even perfect for photography since it doesn’t contradict to the colors of whatever you specialize in photography. However, if you want something different, you can choose in one of the pre-made themes in WordPress, which is mostly offered for free. There are also those that you have to pay to use them. If you want something uniquely yours, you can hire a web developer to create one for you. It can be overwhelming to choose one, so the best way to approach this is by searching for the best themes to use for photography.
To install the theme, click on the Appearance in your WordPress account and click on Themes. From there, click on the Add New button you can find at the top. In the search field, type in the word “photography” and press enter. You will find there all the photography themes. From there, click on the Install button on the theme that you want to use.
Pages and Posts
You will need extra pages to categorize your website. After you have activated your theme, go to Pages then Add New to add new pages to your website. Fill in the space provided. Add as many pages as your want, but you want to simplify it. The most common pages for a website to have are “About,” “Contact,” “Gallery,” and “Services.” You can add a “Blog” if you wish to share and discuss with your visitors about your photography. When you are done with this, go to Appearance then Menus to create a menu for the website. Click on link ‘create a new menu.’ Give your new menu a name. Most sites name it as Main. After you add the menu, it will add all the pages that you have created above into this menu by default. You can even remove pages that you don’t need by click on the Remove link when you expand the menu item.
Next step is to go to the tab Manage Locations and select the drop-down Primary Menu. Ensure that you have saved the changes. After this, you will see the results of the menu that you have created. From hereon, you also get to create posts in every page you make.
Under your Gallery page, add a post where you post all the photos. There is the default Media Library to upload photos, but this is not the best way to show your photography skills. There is a limit to how much you can upload photos in WordPress, so the best thing to do here is to get an Image Gallery Plugin available in WordPress. You must choose the best one in their list, which is determined by the number of votes that users approve of it.
Go to Plugins then Add New. In the search box, type in words “image gallery” and it will return all the image gallery plugins. Install the one that you prefer. Your plugin will get activated once you have already installed it on your WordPress site. Follow the instructions set by the plugin so that you can use it to upload all your photos that you want to show to the public.
