Learn to customize your photography blog!
Quit banging your head on your desk and learn how to do it for real! Hosting? Who? CSS? What? You're a photographer not a computer programmer for cryin' out loud! The next photoblog101 workshop starts the week of October 10...stay tuned for registration information.
Okay okay, well, we actively endorse bluehost.com for hosting needs. They are really fantastic with awesome customer service and unlimited hosting space. But… well…
Dreamhost has the deal of the year this weekend… If you are going to take our class, and need hosting, jump on this. Less than $10 for the domain AND 1-year of hosting is unbelievable.
Check it out!
Your blog is probably one of the most important marketing tools you’ll employ as a photographer. Gone are the days of carrying large portfolio cases, or prints even. Everything is digital. The internet is available almost anywhere at any time. You need to be available too! Your online presence may be the first contact a potential client has with your work. You are going to have to work hard at presenting only your best, in a neat, professional, and easy to navigate format (let’s face it, even our parents and grandparents are online these days…).
A blog is the best SEO tool you have for getting out there. They are a lot of work to get setup but can be a great, fun place to keep your clients (and family… “hi Mom and Dad!”) up to date. You’ll need to make a lot of decisions about what you post and how often, that is all up to you. But, the format MUST be user-friendly and professional if you hope to get anywhere.
Now, those independently wealthy folks out there (do I hear crickets???… ) can pay HUGE bucks to get a super awesome fantabulous custom masterpiece created just for them by a big name programmer and artist… for the rest of us, the approach may be more DIY, plus, it allows YOU to maintain control and make changes as you’d like!
So, here are some of our favorite somewhat-easily customizable FREE wordpress themes (remember, these are for wordpress.org people folks… if you are confused… this about taking our class!)
Our main purpose here is to show you it can be done… and for less money than you think. We’ll get you started down the right path and then the entire world is in YOUR hands!
If you know of other great FREE photography wordpress themes, leave ‘em in the comments.
Like a lot of creative types, photographers by nature want to be able to do things themselves. Most photographers got into photography to take better pictures of their kids. Some might have taken their babies to a portrait studio, paid an arm & a leg and been disappointed with the results. Or you might have been like me and been just too cheap to even do that. Regardless, photographers tend to be quite independent and driven to figure things out on their own rather than leave it to someone else.
So when it comes to creating a photography blog ( just like learning photography), you’ll google and search forums and ask questions and grit your teeth (and sometimes drink wine to take the edge off) and get frustrated. Learning web design is a very different process than learning photography. It’s not nearly as creative and not very fun at all. But you still want to be able to do it on your own! Partly to save money instead of paying a designer, partly to have ownership over the project and partly to be able to switch things up when you have your next new logo designed.
And now…we give you the best of both worlds! With a photoblog101 workshop, you learn the basics of theme customization and blog management right from the experts. We’ve written tutorials just for you. We’ve tweaked the popular SLR theme just for you to use. We’ll answer your questions and then we’ll talk about things like rss, email subscriptions and SEO. Oh yes, we talk SEO. We talk SEO very well.