Hi all,

Zero knowledge on this.. but I wanted to start a blog on my photography service using wordpress..
Appreciate if any of you can advice if its ok for me to follow the below link to kick start my plan..

http://www.makeawebsiteguide.com/

also, what are the necessary (need) plugin that I need to install?

That's a great website tutorial for building a website, you might want to install a plugins to manage your images, such as Lightbox plugins or NextGEN Gallery plugins.

Glad someone replied me!
On image managing part, I was told we can upload to services like smugmug or Flickr then copy the coding?

I'm not sure what lightbox plugin does

This post has been edited by yankiat: Feb 24 2012, 01:43 PM

Yes, you can also upload to Flickr. Flickr is a image hosting site, where you can upload and share your image. since you planning to build a self-hosted wordpress, you can just upload the pictures directly from your website.

Lightbox allow you to control the way you want to showcase your images. Nextgen also do the same as Lightbox but with more extra features. Here's a demo how NextGen works. http://nextgen-gallery.com/ I saw many WP website use Lightbox or Nextgen Gallery.

Great... i'll explore into this for sure.. million thanks!

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Added on February 25, 2012, 12:11 amCan someone advice which free theme is best for a photography blog/site?

This post has been edited by yankiat: Feb 25 2012, 12:11 AM

For a photography based website, here's what you must know:

1. Get a hosting with a company that understands WordPress - website and system will be optimized accordingly, less headaches

2. Pick a light theme - Astra, OceanWP, Page Builder Framework

3. Choose a layout which emphasizes the visuals - free option has some appropriate ones to start with

4. If you want a more flexible gallery, check out plugins like WP Modula, Envira Gallery, FooGallery or NextGen.

5. Install and activate an image optimization plugin like; ShortPixel or TinyPNG

6. Install and activate a plugin like; Flying Images, to lazy load the images and serve them via CDN (in short it's to speed up the load time for your website)

7. Enable gzip compression (if you're using cPanel)

8. Install a caching plugin like Litespeed Cache (if server supports) or WP Fastest Cache or Simple Cache


Keep your photo filesizes less than 200kb. Width of 1400px is more than sufficient - 1920px is pushing it. If you really can't tahan and need higher resolution images, you may want to consider having WP Retina installed.

More than 60% of Internet users browse on their smartphones now, compared to the desktop. The ones who still do it from their desktop are either because of their profession, or an age group who is more comfortable on larger screens.

I would also recommend uploading the photos to your website, than embedding from Flickr. Because each Flickr embed creates a request and the more requests you need to serve, the slower your website will end up loading.

Lastly, you do not need to upload all your photos from Flickr. You should be highlighting your best works - that's a marketing tip for you.


I hope this has helped and wishing you all the best.

This post has been edited by etsuko: Feb 25 2020, 11:20 AM

Hi guys with security issues on the rise, would like to know which plugin do you guys use for backing up your wordpress site? For easy migration to other hosting companies also.

may consider to try akeebabackup for wordpress