Case Study: Creating a Photographers Portfolio In WordPress

I have finally pub­lished a site I had been work­ing on for quite some time and I would like to share with you a bit on how this site was create uti­liz­ing Word­Press. Kelly, an extremely tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher came to me hoping to create a simple yet effec­tive port­fo­lio that would show­case her work for poten­tial cus­tomers and friends alike. Her design style was very much in tune with my own, making this project a plea­sure to work on.

In our ini­tial meet­ing we dis­cussed some of the things she was hoping to do. Obvi­ously the focus here was to be on her pho­tog­ra­phy and she was excited at the prospect of cre­at­ing simple flash gal­leries or ‘portfolios’ based on cat­e­go­rized selec­tions of her work. Most the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion she hoped to convey was to be kept short and sweet, but she did want the abil­ity to edit her con­tent as she deemed nec­es­sary. Kelly had been using a com­bi­na­tion of Type­pad and Flickr to share her work up to this point so I had a feel­ing that not only did she enjoy shar­ing her pho­tog­ra­phy but she was also appre­ci­ated the abil­ity to share her artis­tic thoughts through writ­ing. So I sug­gested to her that we might think about incor­po­rat­ing a weblog with her site. Not only would this allow her to share her thoughts and take a closer look as some of her “shoots”, it would also pro­vide her the abil­ity to add some search­able con­tent to a web­site that was oth­er­wise lite on the con­tent side. Although Kelly’s work speaks for itself we did want to add some focus to search engine opti­miza­tion in order to har­ness the power of her new web­site as a mar­ket­ing tool.

The final diag­no­sis of her project led me to sug­gest a Port­fo­lio site using my old friend Word­Press. Word­Press would not only give Kelly the abil­ity to incor­po­rate a weblog but it would also allow all the nec­es­sary edit­ing capa­bil­ity that she desired. By cre­at­ing a series of custom ’static’ pages and incor­po­rat­ing a cus­tomized weblog, Kelly now has the abil­ity to edit infor­ma­tion, share her thoughts and create flash gal­leries of her work. The end result is a web­site design that truly cap­tures the per­son­al­ity of Kelly as a pho­tog­ra­pher and as an artist.

I was having so much fun cre­at­ing the web­site and design­ing a new logo for Kelly that I couldn’t help but take it one step fur­ther and offer a busi­ness card design to boot. Thanks to Kelly Stein­berg, this project has been a truly great way to kick off my career as freelancer!

I will be adding this site and the busi­ness card to my port­fo­lio soon, but for now go check out Kelly’s site at www.​kellystein​berg​pho​tog​ra​phy.com.