If you are a professional photographer or an amateur photographer and want to showcase your work on a Website in a creative and artistic way, you don’t need to go to a Macromedia Flash based website. You can use WordPress – a most attractive and relatively easiest way of building Photography website on it.
On the other hand, if you want to run a photo sharing site like a Flicker, WordPress with lots of other features provide you to sell out and present your photographs online.
Why WordPress For The Photographers?
Before providing you a list of tips and tricks about using WordPress, We are trying to explain first, why Photographers must use WordPress to present their work online?
As everybody knows that WordPress is not anymore a blogging platform, because of its reliability, built-in flexibility, secure code, and search engines friendly features, WordPress become the most attractive and preferred framework for creating most of the websites including Photography with eCommerce features.
Well, WordPress is a Free Software and you can have all the source code under your control, the best reason of using WordPress is that you can run your site very quickly with basic structure and design, then you can customize the design without professional Designer’s help, because most of the Theme providers provide help and tips abut their theme customization. If you want to change your design, simply select the other theme and change the whole new look on your website. You can Extend you website Functionality With WordPress Plugins according to your requirements. You can run Photography website and blog under one roof to get the SEO benefits.
Search Engine Optimization for Photographers
There are WordPress Plugins for Photographers which help you to optimized your content and make images more searchable with business management functionality so that your website works for you in many ways.
Stop Words In Photography SEO
SEO Tips for Photographers
SEO For Photographers ~ Photography SEO Audit
Search engine optimization for photographers SEO basics
Essential WordPress Plugins For Photographers & Their Business
The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For WordPress Sites
SEO Infographics to Increase Website Ranking in Search Engine
WordPress E-Commerce Seo Plugin
WordPress E-Commerce Seo Plugin is an e-commerce centric SEO plugin for WordPress. With this plugin, you can add rich snippets like rating, book, offers for your products. You can analyze your products SEO. You can use video SEO to optimize your product traffic, Google plus author profile in search results, video sitemap, use breadcrumbs plus many more features.
smart SEO – WordPress Plugin
The easiest way to optimize your WordPress website for search engines!
Settings – Here you have:
- Autocheck current post
- Autocheck timing – in seconds
- Title separator (default – )
- Seo title position – in admin post listing
- Show smartSeo score
- On plugin deactivate – remove all current settings on plugin deactivate. Reset to default.
WordPress SEO Plugin
Another plugin from Joost and also one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress directory. WordPress SEO makes it very simple for anyone to add SEO functionality to a website. The plugin also adds necessary Open Graph data for sharing on Facebook, Google Plus, etc. Optimizing your photography website has never been easier.
WP Secure – Hide The Fact And Speed Up Your Site
WP Secure Pro (WPS) is a WordPress plugin, which can be used to hide the fact and Speed Up Your Site, No one can know You are using what plugin/theme. Works with other Security/Cache plugins, tested with Better WP Security, WP Super Cache. Without any changes in Core, Files, Folders, Database structure. Easy installing and managing or uninstalling
Readable image filenames
For Photographers images are the most important thing, so always give a proper file name to your image, you can use beautiful and meaningful file name like this:
seo-photograpers.jpg, try not to use generic file name like this DSC04366.jpg, picture6.jpg or 20130930-tda-0006.jpg
One more important thing, never overboard with keywords or you will dilute the value of each keyword included. Use “-” instead of empty spaces, which show up like this in URLs: %20
. Following WordPress Plugins are helpful for optimization.
SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you set. Additionally, this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin
Create a responsive (mobile friendly) or fullwidth slider with must-see-effects and meanwhile keep or build your SEO optimization (all content always readable for search engines). See the heaps of custom transitions/animations for each object on the page! Customize this slider with our convenient drag & drop backend to your very needs. This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your effects.
WordPress Advanced Image Lazy Load
Your website has a lot of image intensive content and takes up a lot of resources when loading up? Your boss and your clients consider the pages fluidity a serious matter? With WP Image Lazy Load plugin, no more need to sacrifice your beautiful images quality!
Empty alt and title attributes
The ALT attribute is an important part of search engine optimization. It describes your images to search engine and when a user searches for a particular image, this is a key determining factor for a match. TITLE attribute plays a lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when the mouse is over the image. SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes.
You can add alt and title text to images in WordPress when you upload the image. After uploading an image using WordPress’ Add Media button, click Show and you will see the Title and Alternative Text fields.
The title attribute is displayed on tags when hovering your mouse over an image (also known as a “tooltip”). Following is an image tag example with optimized filenames, alt and title attributes:
How to improve WordPress title tags
Post Content ALT & Title Editor
This plugin can change the title and ALT of all the images in post content. The plugin lists the posts on a table which you can order by name or category. When you select one post, you see the images it has on its content, with a thumbnail and current (if any) title and ALT values. You can edit them from there.
Thumbnails for existing photos in WordPress
WordPress lets you customize the thumbnails for each of your images. A common mistake is that if you have set the image sizes on the Media Settings page and after some time you change the theme, it will resize all existing photos in WordPress. WordPress creates thumbnails when you first upload the photo; you might need to re-size these previously uploaded images. By using the Following Plugins, you can manage your thumbnails.
Regenerate Thumbnails
Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images or have changed to a theme with different featured post image dimensions.
Theia Smart Thumbnails
Theia Smart Thumbnails for WordPress lets you customize the thumbnails for each of your images. Gone are the days when you had to crop or upload separate versions of your thumbnails manually. Now you can just choose a point of interest for your image – e.g. a person’s face, an object, etc. – and all the thumbnails will be automatically updated to include them. Your pages will be much more aesthetically pleasing and your visitors will thank you for it.
Image Sizes Manager
- easily add, edit, delete & regenerate all image sizes
- manage built-in, 3rd party and your custom image sizes
- asynchronous, fast, fail-safe image regenerating with a convenient progress bar
- great for complex themes with many image sizes
- full WP admin integration with native WP GUI
- [thumbnail size=”your-image-size” /] shortcode for inserting custom size thumbnails in posts and pages
Thumbnail Gallery (WP NextGEN Gallery Template)
This NextGEN Template will help you to easily add a thumbnail gallery to your WordPress website or blog. The gallery is completely customizable, resizable and is compatible with all browsers and devices (iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones). For this to work you need to have NextGEN Gallery installed.
Create a “cached” version of website
There are lots of images on photography websites, which leads to slow loading web pages, You can speed up loading by having Cached your website. Thankfully, there’s a plugin for that. This is the fact that photos and graphics bring more organic traffic to their site, especially if we are thinking about Google Image Search. In the following links, you can find few basic tips and tricks, which help you to optimize your images for Google, Bing, Yahoo and create more search engine exposure for your WordPress site.
How to Troubleshoot Slow loading Site and WordPress blog
How to tweak your website images for maximum SEO
How to manipulate image sizes to speed up WordPress blog load times
How to Increase WordPress Performance through Lazy Load Widgets
There are WordPress Plugins which help to decrease the load time and resulting in a faster page load, these plugins help to cache every aspect of your site, and reduce the load times and provide content delivery network (CDN) integration.
WordPress Booster – Caching Plugin
This plugin provides only fastest and simplest caching of your WordPress site and nothing else. If you want to boost your WordPress speed, this plugin is for you. You don’t need to do any actions but install the plugin and one click of “Cache All Pages” This plugin includes gzip compression feature which makes your site much faster.
W3 Total Cache
The only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework; designed to improve user experience and page speed. Recommended by web hosts like WPEngine, HostMonster, BlueHost, and countless more.
Performance Optimizer Plugin for WordPress
The plugin will help you increase the performance of your WordPress website. We aim to do this by optimizing key features of the website’s loading process thus increasing the loading speed and limiting the bandwidth consumption.
Contact Detail and About us mail
It is very important to make it clear for your visitor to make contact with you, so they can call you or email you. Never forget to add you contact number on contact us page with physical address and email. Put Contact us page link in the footer or sidebar on every page and post. Also include a short personal bio, with photo, to make your site a bit more personable. You can use following WordPress plugin to represents your contact detail and about yourself.
Addax – About Me Widget
Do you need to add information about yourself on a site? Now it’s easy with Addax. Addax is the WordPress Widget in a Metro Style. Using it you can add your Avatar, Name, Text about yourself links to social networks.
GPP About You Widget
GPP About You Widget is a plugin that adds a widget for easily creating an about you section to any widgetized region in your
Generate an opt-in, opt-out mailing list
Email marketing helps you to communicate efficiently, provide targeted information to site visitors of recipients through automated campaigns. Make sure your newsletter look professional and must have a unsubscribe link. There are lots of email marketing services available, here is a list of few WordPress plugins that have good integration with your WordPress powered website, so you can turn your site visitors into loyal and regular readers that will be converted to potential customers:
MyMail – Email Newsletter Plugin for WordPress
Subscribe2
Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog.
Groups Newsletters
Groups Newsletters helps you to communicate efficiently, providing targeted information to groups of recipients through automated campaigns.
Re-size and optimize images before uploading
Loading time of website directly impact users and ranking position. As compare to text, images take more time to load and search engines indexed those web pages which have less load time and user spend time that gives a good impression to search engines.
To load your image fast, you will have to optimize images by manipulating their size. I recommend you to use compression of images to light up your sites’ load. To load your web pages images quickly, make a smaller image in size. Here are a few simple rules— they will help you minimize image sizes and will reduce the loading times. More about Image file formats.
How to manipulate image sizes to speed up WordPress blog load times
How to tweak your website images for maximum SEO
How to Customize Thumbnail and Crop images in WordPress
Avoid to Use Flash
Although most Photographers know that Flash is not more attractive to present creative work, there are lots of other jQuery Plugin (Useful Tooltips Tutorials and jQuery Plugins)to enhance the image presentation. Flash files are not searched able for search engines, so avoid to use it because is black box for search engines. If still, you are interested in using flash files on your WordPress powered website.
Improve Your WordPress Blog With Flash and Video players
Mobile Friendly Responsive Design
In the link bellow, there is a list of plugins that will pretty much take care of the design aspect of your mobile site, as well a list of WordPress Themes and a service like MobiReady to check your website’s mobile compliance and friendly.
How to make Mobile Friendly WordPress Blog
How to build a responsive WordPress Theme with Twitter Bootstrap Framework
Considerations for Designing a Mobile Website
Best Responsive WordPress Themes for All Devices and Screen Resolutions
PhotoBlogging With WordPress Theme
There are plenty of useful resources on the web for PhotoBlogging WordPress themes, and here we’re gathering best of them together in this post. Do let us know in the comments if we’re missing out something here!
Photocrati BUILT-IN E-COMMERCE galleries!
WHAT’S IN PHOTOCRATI 4.0?
- Built-in gallery management!
- Built-in eCommerce galleries! Add eCommerce galleries with print sizes and prices. Comes with shopping cart functionality, integrated with Paypal. Accept Paypal or credit cards for purchases. You’ll be notified of purchases and sent an order summary. You’ll fulfill orders yourself at your preferred print lab.
- iPhone / iPad compatibility.
- Copyright protection for Photocrati Galleries – no right clicking, dragging images to desktop, or viewing source URLs.
- Albums. Now add album pages – with thumbnails linking to each of your galleries.
- Border controls. Customize borders on images and thumbnails in galleries.
- Music. Add music to your home page, gallery pages, and blog page.
- IPTC Data. Automatically imports IPTC headlines and captions.
If you’ve got any questions, or advice that you think I’ve missed, let me know in the comments below.
Share Your Thoughts