How to start Photoblogging with WordPress

By Deep Wadhwa Our Bestseller: WordPress Themes

Recently I have come to know about Photoblogging in WordPress i.e. How someone who has a keen interest in photography can start a photoblog using WordPress. If you are fond of sharing photos on your website or want to make a successful career as a photographer then this article is for you.

In the following article I will be taking a gaze at certain key points that one should follow while creating a photoblog with WordPress. The following guidelines are covered in this article:

1. Things which you need to care of before starting a photoblog with WordPress.
2. How to use a caching plugin and CDN can be handy for a website.
3. Introduction to the themes which are designed for photography.
4. Responsive Gallery feature in WordPress.
5. A few more suggestions to end up well.

1. Grab initials first

Before you start a photoblog in WordPress, you should take care of few things:

At the time of uploading images, make sure you have resized them to a correct dimension (which can alter on the cornerstone of the topic you are using) Avoid uploading the photographs directly from your camera, without any resizing. Uploading high resolution images on the blog will slow down your website because of bigger file sizes. Double-check that the pictures and photographs are correctly characterized with proper ALT and Title attributes. Mostly, search engines focus on ALT and Title attributes of pictures to decipher their content. So it’s important to define these attributes wisely. Also having a proper content attached to the images can help to get a better page rank. Don’t forget to rename your image files before uploading them. Keep in mind, while renaming the file names, the content should not be too long or too short. It should have some relevant text and keywords. Instead of using spaces in content prefer to use dashes or underscores. For e.g. “Wallpaper-image. png” is better than “1120 20A.png”.2. Use Caching Plugin and CDN

If your blog contains bigger file size images and media content then speed is a crucial concern. As an outcome, utilizing a good caching plugin would be of great help to speed up the website. A cached website can burden substantially much quicker than one without a caching plugin & therefore, for a photoblog, you should definitely opt a good caching plugin.
I would recommend to use W3 Total Cache pluginfor such purpose. It might play an effective role to improve the performance of your website.
One more thing which you should keep in consideration is that nearer your visitors are to the servers, the faster your pictures will load for them. For instance, if your website gets visitors from Asia, then having a CDN provider with a server in Hong Kong will give results as compared to relying entirely on your US-based hosting servers. Thus , selecting a proper CDN would also matters.
Another exceptional CDN service is Jetpack’s Photon CDN. A photon is a CDN service which is particularly for those WordPress users who share a lot of images on their website. It works with pictures and assists content dynamically from WP.com cloud servers, thereby providing your visitors with a faster experience when browsing your website. Right now, Photon works only with PNG, JPG and GIF formats. It can also be handy to speed up your photoblog.

3. WordPress themes for photography

Several WordPress themes like Real Photography Responsive theme, Elegant photography, etc.  are specially designed for a photography website. Real Photographyis specially designed for photographers who want to showcase their work. You can check out the live preview of the theme.

Moreover, Photocratiand Graph Paper Pressare the two worthy websites that contain all the themes for photoblogging.
Beyond that if you make a determination to explore for a photoblogger’s subject from scratch, choose a theme with neutral colors. Though this counts on the environment of your photographs, a neutral color combines well with most kinds of photos and furthermore places the aim on the pictures rather than the background design. The important thing here is to use good design that should complement the background and permit the photographs contents to do the talking.
You can also use a tumblogging themeif you are unsure to go with a dedicated “photography theme”. All tumblog themes come with support for post formats and they can display quite well. Moreover, tumblog themes do not support the annoying concept of splash pages and help your visitors to focus directly on your work.

4. Responsive Gallery Feature in WordPress

A user can add multiple images to the blogs in a clean and efficient manner by using the gallery feature in WordPress. However, the default gallery feature in WordPress, though astonishing but does not perform well as per the expectations when accomplishing on mobile platforms. Even if you are working with a responsive theme, the gallery layout and appearance can definitely use a bit of a face-lift.
JM HTML5 Responsive Gallery pluginand MaxGalleriaby MAX Foundry are used for making responsive galleries.
JM HTML% does not have much to configure. All you need is to install it and activate it and it will replace the default gallery markup in WordPress with HTML5.
Whereas MaxGalleria helps you to create responsive galleries (support both photos and videos) on your WordPress website. You can configure the number of options like layout, templates, lightboxes, etc. It integrates well with the WordPress Media Gallery and if you are looking for an advanced plugin to help you setup responsive galleries, MaxGalleria might be the ideal tool for the job.

5. Few more suggestions If you are aspiring for lead generation, put some information about yourself possibly on an About page and a Contact form on your photoblog. If you are not interested to use an About page you can use a widget plugin to place your short bio in the footer. As nowadays, most themes rely on the featured images to grab thumbnails and preview for posts. Make sure that your posts have featured images. Using post captions is also useful to attract the attention of the visitors. Try to keep your photoblogging as simple as possible. Don’t use super sophisticated and fancy images in the header. Instead use a simple and minimal logo. Focus on your visitors will be the actual photography. By default WordPress applies JPEG compression to resize the images. So you need to have a bit of knowledge about image compression in WordPress. If you often do experiments with your camera, try to provide information along with the images in an unobtrusive manner. Whereas if you have a constant gear of cameras and you accomplish all your clicks using them, you should talk about them on a separate page rather than of appending the identical camera details with each image.

Hope this article will guide you in the best way to start photoblogging in WordPress. If you like this one you can share your thoughts or comments below.

About Deep Wadhwa
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"I believe in basics which builds up perfection and enhance creativity. Thanks to Blogging through which I can share my experience with you!!!!".

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