I’m slowly amassing a collection of photography projects and jobs and they’re sitting on my hard drive doing nothing. I had a friend building me a website but it’s about 4 months overdue now so I want something I can do myself.

Where the hell do I start? I have a domain name registered on domainmonster. So now I need webspace is that right?

Can anyone recommend a good template for photography? There’s loads listed but how flexible and customisable are they? I’m not seeing a preview site that looks exactly how I’d like it so how much can I change them? I wanted something where I could mix words and pictures but have large, high quality images in some kind of cool, scrolling slideshow thing.

I really like the look of this one- http://devinfeil.com/

Built with something called Squarespace. I’d use that but there’s quite a high monthly fee. I don’t mind paying for a good WordPress template but don’t want any monthly subscriptions.

Any thoughts? Not really sure where to start!

I bought a StudioPress theme:
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/

They’ll also provide WordPress hosting or for a cheap virtual server I recommend Host Europe:
https://www.hosteurope.de/en/

Once set up you can install WordPress directly from the Plesk control panel, which takes all the hassle out of the job.

plenty of templates similar to that one here;

http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/subjects/photography/

Worpdress si simple and has lots of “plugins” that will do nearly everything you can think of.

You need a hosting package as well as your domain, most hosts have automated wordpress installers in the control panel so its all fairly straight forward

HI,

I just set up my website using a free wordpress template, having never used it before. Once you have a play about for a bit its actually pretty simple to get decent results quite quickly. A lot of the free templates are quite customisable and usually they have the option to use image sliders and lightbox type galleries. There is also a host of plugins for galleries and stuff too. Support is pretty good as well.

123 reg are pretty cheap for hosting and they have the built in worpress support so its dead simple to setup.my website is http://www.thursdayshirts.co.uk. If you go and click on one of the products then click on the image it will launch a gallery to give you an idea of what it can do

Is it going to be more bloggy, or more of a fixed site? WordPress is great, and with tweaking you can make it look like anything you like, but it’s a blogging platform underneath so I think most suited to that. Lightroom, if you use that (and if you don’t, why not?) has some very good website templates built in as well.

For comparison, my urbex website is built on WordPress, and is more bloggy: http://www.transientplaces.co.uk

But my commercial photography website is built in a Lightroom theme, and is more static: http://www.catchingphotons.co.uk

I’m getting stuck into it with Zenfolio. The do all the boring stuff like hosting and domain names, I just signed up and started building my site instantly. If I can get it set up they way I like within the 14 day trial I’ll happily give them my money.