Dave Stevenson
Photographers must have an online presence to show off their work, but building eye-catching, image-based sites is no walk in the park.
I built my first website when I was 14. Coincidentally, that was also the year I didn’t have my first girlfriend. Building a website, as you know, has always been a pain. HTML, of course, is a markedly easier-to-use language than, say, C+, and CSS is easier still. Last year, however, I had a go at building a site using Dreamweaver, and although I eventually got something that looked and worked how I wanted, updating it was such a colossal pain I ended up erasing the whole thing. It was like trying to build a house by laying the bricks with your eyes shut.
In the end, I did what I always do. Swear loudly, resign myself to using the wonderfully flexible and reasonably fool-proof WordPress, and promise that I’d learn some proper coding skills next time. My work site, which is basically a list of recent jobs I’ve done and links to various clients, is text-only, on the grounds that discerning editors don’t need a lot of distracting eye-candy to get them to commission me. Even so, if you’ve never had a go at building a site by hand, you really should. Even my text-only site would have taken the better part of a week to get right, and updating it would be duller than a supermodel’s book club. You would be staggered at how long it takes to build a well-balanced, functional site and even more amazed at how you can do the whole thing in an afternoon with a decent content management system.
Congratulating myself on my wisdom, I moved on to my photographic site. The idea was simple – this time, no text, lots of lovely big pictures, and links to my Twitter feed and email address so friendly, like-minded types could get in touch. WordPress, again, was my weapon of choice.
The problem, of course, is that as soon as you start tinkering with any WordPress theme, you can think of a million things you want to change, and before you know it it’s four o’clock on a Saturday morning, you’re up to your neck in TextEdit windows, FTP clients and web browsers, nothing works properly and you’re laboriously picking your way back through a dozen CSS files trying to find exactly which one of your 200 changes was the one that broke everything.
By the time it was finished, and not without the help of a few far more talented people than me (‘the artistic inclination of a pub toilet’ was one art teacher’s withering assessment), I was pleased. The result was eye-catching, it worked well across a range of browsers, and did precisely what I’d set out to do: showed pictures I’d taken so I could point interested editors and print-buyers at it.
Then I finished processing a large batch of shots from a recent trip. Getting pictures into a WordPress installation is ever so slightly less than straightforward. You can upload en-masse, but assembling the images into a post takes, approximately, forever. It was then that my eye was caught, really for the first time, by Lightroom’s innocuous web module. I normally only ever use Lightroom’s Library and Develop modules. Once an image is finished, it gets exported, either for the web or for printing by a third party.
However, faced with 70-plus images for uploading and sorting into WordPress, I wondered, idly at first, how complicated I really needed to make things. Five minutes later, a miniature web portfolio was humming away on my server. Lightroom re-sized the images I’d picked, slapped them into an HTML template and – I love this- fired the whole lot at an FTP server.
What I particularly like about Lightroom’s – and, to a lesser extent, Aperture’s – web output options is that it allows non code-savvy photographers to instantly create an online presence. A modern photographer without a website is like a Formula One driver without a key – it really doesn’t matter how good you are without one.
The result wasn’t exactly beautiful. There’s no integration with Google’s – or anyone else’s – visitor tracking API, and the bundled themes are uninteresting, but the whole lot took 15 minutes to rustle up and worked beautifully. Knocking together an approval portfolio for a client? Lightroom will let you do it in a few minutes, and once you’re commissioned, clients are hardly going to care about the packaging of an online contact sheet as long as it works quickly.
Or, if you’re willing to open your wallet, there’s the spectacularly well-featured, if rather unwieldy, Highslide Gallery plug-in, which includes some eye-pleasing animations and an option for e-commerce. Apart from allowing you to build a larger site from within Lightroom, complete with About and Contact pages, for instance, you can create a contact sheet with Ajax-style tick and cross buttons, allowing someone to go through a gallery and mark the images they like, returning the form to you via PHP and email. The beauty of it is that you really don’t need to know what PHP means, or even what it is.
There’s still plenty of room for custom-built websites, of course. The problem with template-based sites from either application is that once a few prominent photographers have used them, the templates start to look rather samey. There’s also the problem of integrating other pages into the sites automatically generated by Lightroom and Aperture – if you want a blog, for instance, you’d need to go the decidedly anti-intuitive route of hosting it in a sub-directory from your main site and hand-coding the links to it.
For me, then, WordPress remains king. At its most basic, you can have it up and running in five minutes, nab someone else’s theme (legally, natch), and have somewhere reliable to host your images. And, for those who are happy enough to start grappling with the twin monsters of HTML and CSS, it’s limitlessly customisable. Start spending some money and you can get some amazing results – have a look at the themes available at graphpaperpress.com, for instance. Just remember that the quickest, simplest and most effective ways of doing something are sometimes the same.
