My blog is powered by WordPress because it’s the easiest way to maintain a blog-site (blog and website) for showcasing my photography work. I used to design my own custom theme, so that I can place my content exactly where I want it, but it takes a fair bit of CSS and PHP programming knowledge to be able to build your own theme from scratch. I got lazy and decided to try out a stock theme from ThemeForest, which I’m currently using and am very happy with.

In addition to being a photographer, I also build websites for small companies (and some medium-sized ones too) that run on WordPress as a CMS (content management system).  Having your corporate website built from scratch by an experienced designer is of course the ideal route if there is a sufficient budget. It also requires spending a fair bit of time collaborating with the designer to create a WordPress website that will address your business objectives and score well in Google search results. A WordPress website makes updating your content extremely easy, you don’t need to go back to the web designer to update your website. As the owner of the website, you manage the website entirely, from adding/deleting unlimited pages (including password-protected pages), re-arranging them, adding images and video, and the best thing is that your navigation bar is automatically updated to reflect your changes!

For those who wish to take a much easier and faster route, there are several companies selling high-quality premium themes for WordPress websites. I recommend Elegant Themes for their attractive and user-friendly themes. Each theme is crafted professionally. Besides looking beautiful, their themes are very functional, and comes with amazing support. As long as you are a member of Elegant Themes, you can be sure that your theme will always be compatible with the latest version of WordPress and the most recent web browsers.

Theme Forest is another company with really awesome WordPress themes that are perfect for showcasing your photography portfolio. The advantage of Theme Forest is that they also cater to those who use Joomla (content management system), Magento (e-commerce), PSD (Photoshop layered documents) and many more, in case your website/blog does not run on WordPress. Their range of themes is so huge, you will definitely find a theme that suits you, and your budget.

Once you’ve got your WordPress theme, it’s time to shop for a web hosting company that you can rely on. GoDaddy is a consistent favorite, boasting 99.9% uptime commitment, round-the-clock support and access to dozens of free downloadable applications. The best thing is, they’re WordPress ready, giving you all the flexibility and support for a great WordPress-based photography blog-site. Did I mention they also have the lowest prices for domain names too? I got my goodphotography.info domain from them.

Last but not least, a professionally designed logo speaks volumes about your business. Make sure you get a professional graphic designer to do it.

Search engine optimization is high on the must-have list for websites, because if your website is buried in the 128th page of Google’s search results, who on earth will find you?