In the last few years WordPress has emerged as the most widely used website development platform in the world.
It originally started as purely a blogging platform but has become so much more than that – you can now create virtually any kind of website quickly and easily using the countless themes and plugins created by third-party developers.
So what makes WordPress so ideal for developing photographers websites?
Powerful Plugins
WordPress is an open source platform, which means that anyone can create add-ons to the software to perform any extra function they need from their website.
These add-ons are known as plugins, and for everything that you’d like your website to do, you can almost guarantee that someone has created a plugin (most of which are freely available) that can take care of it for you.
This gives you a great deal of control over your website and allows you to do things that you’d normally have to pay thousands of dollars to a web developer for.
Premium Themes
As a photographer, you need to have a website that’s visually impressive – after all, if you’re going to be judged on the quality of your photos it’s only reasonable to assume that the website that displays those photos is also going to be judged on its appearance.
In the past the most attractive websites tended to be Flash-based websites – but these kinds of websites are terrible for SEO so there was always a bit of a trade-off.
But the past couple of years have seen an explosion in premium WordPress themes – these are themes that have been created by professional designers and which now rival and surpass the very best looking flash websites out there.
So now you can get the best of both worlds – a website that both looks good and does a great job of attracting visitors from the search engines.
Great For SEO
WordPress is excellent for SEO.
Between the clean design of the coding, and the SEO specific plugins available it is now easier than ever for people with very little SEO knowledge to make sure that their website ticks all the boxes with regards to good SEO practices.
Blog & Portfolio Website In One
Having a blog attached to your website is a great way to keep that website fresh and increase the ways that people can find your business and check out your work.
With WordPress it’s very easy to have both a website that is focused on your business and your portfolio, along with a blog that you can use to keep people up-to-date with what’s going on in your business.
You’re able to manage both areas of your website from within the one dashboard.
Easy To Change The Entire Look Of Your Site
One of the problems faced by many small business owners including photographers is that they change their mind about how they’d like their website to look.
Either they’re not happy with the work done by a web designer or they simply get tired of their site and want a fresh look.
One of the great things about WordPress is that the appearance of the site is controlled by the use of themes. So with the click of a button the entire look of your site can be transformed.
The underlying structure of the site remains the same, so to get a ‘new’ website online you don’t need to go out and have the entire website overhauled.
You simply find a new theme, upload and activate it and then make any minor changes to the look of your new theme.
Easily Integrated With Social Media Accounts
WordPress is a dynamic web platform that integrates very easily with other Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr.
This further increase the ability of your website to generate new clients from a range of marketing strategies.
User Friendly
WordPress was designed to be used by people who had no idea about designing a website and altering web code.
Like anything there is a bit of a learning curve, but there are literally thousands of video tutorials freely available on YouTube, so no matter what you want to do with your site, there’ll be a video somehwere explaining how it’s done.
And in the majority of cases you’ll never have to touch any web code – it’s all done from within a Content Management System that is very easy to use, regardless of your skill and experience.
Conclusion
So if you’re thinking about overhauling your website, or you’re in the process of deciding what sort of website to put online, I’d highly recommend considering a WordPress site.
More and more photographers websites are being built with this platform and if you’re serious bout having a website that not only looks good, but is an effective marketing tool for your business, than WordPress is certainly the way to go.
It originally started as purely a blogging platform but has become so much more than that – you can now create virtually any kind of website quickly and easily using the countless themes and plugins created by third-party developers.
So what makes WordPress so ideal for developing photographers websites?
Powerful Plugins
WordPress is an open source platform, which means that anyone can create add-ons to the software to perform any extra function they need from their website.
These add-ons are known as plugins, and for everything that you’d like your website to do, you can almost guarantee that someone has created a plugin (most of which are freely available) that can take care of it for you.
This gives you a great deal of control over your website and allows you to do things that you’d normally have to pay thousands of dollars to a web developer for.
Premium Themes
As a photographer, you need to have a website that’s visually impressive – after all, if you’re going to be judged on the quality of your photos it’s only reasonable to assume that the website that displays those photos is also going to be judged on its appearance.
In the past the most attractive websites tended to be Flash-based websites – but these kinds of websites are terrible for SEO so there was always a bit of a trade-off.
But the past couple of years have seen an explosion in premium WordPress themes – these are themes that have been created by professional designers and which now rival and surpass the very best looking flash websites out there.
So now you can get the best of both worlds – a website that both looks good and does a great job of attracting visitors from the search engines.
Great For SEO
WordPress is excellent for SEO.
Between the clean design of the coding, and the SEO specific plugins available it is now easier than ever for people with very little SEO knowledge to make sure that their website ticks all the boxes with regards to good SEO practices.
Blog & Portfolio Website In One
Having a blog attached to your website is a great way to keep that website fresh and increase the ways that people can find your business and check out your work.
With WordPress it’s very easy to have both a website that is focused on your business and your portfolio, along with a blog that you can use to keep people up-to-date with what’s going on in your business.
You’re able to manage both areas of your website from within the one dashboard.
Easy To Change The Entire Look Of Your Site
One of the problems faced by many small business owners including photographers is that they change their mind about how they’d like their website to look.
Either they’re not happy with the work done by a web designer or they simply get tired of their site and want a fresh look.
One of the great things about WordPress is that the appearance of the site is controlled by the use of themes. So with the click of a button the entire look of your site can be transformed.
The underlying structure of the site remains the same, so to get a ‘new’ website online you don’t need to go out and have the entire website overhauled.
You simply find a new theme, upload and activate it and then make any minor changes to the look of your new theme.
Easily Integrated With Social Media Accounts
WordPress is a dynamic web platform that integrates very easily with other Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr.
This further increase the ability of your website to generate new clients from a range of marketing strategies.
User Friendly
WordPress was designed to be used by people who had no idea about designing a website and altering web code.
Like anything there is a bit of a learning curve, but there are literally thousands of video tutorials freely available on YouTube, so no matter what you want to do with your site, there’ll be a video somehwere explaining how it’s done.
And in the majority of cases you’ll never have to touch any web code – it’s all done from within a Content Management System that is very easy to use, regardless of your skill and experience.
Conclusion
So if you’re thinking about overhauling your website, or you’re in the process of deciding what sort of website to put online, I’d highly recommend considering a WordPress site.
More and more photographers websites are being built with this platform and if you’re serious bout having a website that not only looks good, but is an effective marketing tool for your business, than WordPress is certainly the way to go.
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