10 Must Have Plug Ins for a Photographer Website
If you’re planning on selling photos online, publicizing your portfolio or promoting your photography business, you need to create a website that showcases your images and skill with a camera. There are hundreds of photographer websites out there, so what’s going to make yours stand out from the crowd and bring in business?
The answer is the effective use of image plug ins, small pieces of software you can add to your WordPress program to customize it to suit your photography needs. These will ensure your photos are presented beautifully, capture the attention of your site visitors and encourage them to buy your services. Here are 10 must have plug ins that are essential for the success of any photography website. You can download them all direct from our WordPress resources page.
This is one of the simplest image plug ins to create a website that displays your portfolio of photographs. It quickly and easily converts a standard WordPress blog into an image gallery and is compatible with most WordPress themes. You can place your latest images on the sidebar and create thumbnails of your photographs. If you combine it with the YAPB Bulk Uploader you can also upload multiple images.
This plug in gives your website a professional looking photo gallery that allows easy access through your portfolio, with the option of a Flash slideshow. Other features include the ability to create albums, add a watermark or text to your images and place a slideshow of recent photographs on your sidebar. This is one of the most popular image gallery plug ins and well worth considering for your site.
If you want to promote your business and photography services you need a website that does well in the search engine rankings and pulls in good levels of organic traffic. Search engine optimization is vital and this plug in helps you to maximise your images and their descriptions. It automatically updates all images on your site with ALT and TITLE attributes which can boost your search engine success.
A popular way of displaying photos is to create a gallery with a page flip feature. Potential customers can then easily go through your portfolio and check out your images. This is a really contemporary and eye grabbing way of presenting your photos to the public.
5. Fotobook:
If you’re regularly promoting your images and business through Facebook, this could be the perfect plug in for your photographer website. It links to your Facebook account and allows you to integrate all your Facebook galleries within your WordPress site. You can also import from multiple Facebook accounts and easily insert individual images into posts.
If you want to create a photo gallery similar to the one in Adobe Photoshop CS2, this plug in is what you’re looking for. Make a lasting visual impression with flash galleries that can be inserted into any page on your site with the use of a code tag. Compatible with WordPress and WordPress MU (WordPress Multi User for those with multiple blogs controlled from a single platform), it uses the built-in media uploader to add your photos, which can then be turned into multiple flash galleries across your entire site.
7. WP-Cycle:
A really unique plug in that’s ideal for photographer websites. You can upload images directly from your computer, which are then generated into a jQuery slideshow that looks just like Flash. The other really great thing about this plug in is that each image can be tagged to a specific URL on your website, so that when the image is clicked it takes the viewer to a particular page. This is where you could provide more information on the photograph, how to buy it or some sales copy about the services you provide.
8. Thumbnail Viewer:
Once a visitor clicks on one of your images, this handy little plug in creates a pop up effect by displaying the full size image as a layer on top of the page. This is a great way to create a website that showcases your images and allows viewers to have a closer look at your photographs.
Although most photographers have an image manager on their computer which they use to edit photos before uploading to a website, this is a useful plug in that lets you do some last minute tweaks to your photographs. You can create thumbnails, resize and crop, as well as use the features that allow you to cache, frame and add captions to your images. Your readers and site visitors can also give their views on your images, with the ability to add comments to your photos.
10. Photo Galleria
This is a powerful photo gallery plug in that allows professionals to portray their images in a beautiful, elegant yet simple way. If you want to create a website that lets your images do the talking then this plug in is ideal. It gives you all the tools to design a top class photographer website with images that fade in and out and thumbnails that develop into ultra high resolution pictures. It’s compatible with WordPress 2.9 or higher.
About the Author
Melanie Citron is a freelance writer and self proclaimed “techie” who lives in Denver with her husband, Glenn, and their three dogs Ralph, Sam and Billy. Melanie has become the “go to person” for creating online businesses for her friends and family. “I do it every day so I may as well write about it” Her knowledge has appeared on websites, in local newspapers and in person as a public speaker. In her spare time Melanie loves the outdoors and hikes and cross country skis.