WordPress: A Comprehensive Overview

As you explore the world of blogging and website creation, one tool stands out as a powerhouse option: WordPress. With its vast array of features, flexibility, and ease of use, it's no wonder why many content creators swear by this platform. In this article, we'll delve into the intricacies of WordPress and explore its various aspects that make it an ideal choice for bloggers, photographers, and anyone looking to create a stunning online presence.

Developing Themes

One of the most exciting features of WordPress is its theme customization capabilities. The platform comes pre-installed with two default themes, which can be easily replaced or customized to suit your taste. What's even more impressive is that you can develop your own themes from scratch using various coding languages and design tools. This feature allows you to breathe new life into your website without having to rebuild it entirely.

The Importance of Theme Separation

One of the key benefits of WordPress lies in its ability to separate content from design. This means that as a blogger, you can update or change your layout, pages, or even widgets without affecting the underlying structure of your site. Imagine having the flexibility to revamp your website's design at any time, without having to worry about rebuilding everything from scratch. It's this separation that makes WordPress an ideal choice for those who want to maintain control over their content and presentation.

Widgets and Editors

WordPress also offers a range of widgets, which can be used to enhance the functionality and aesthetic appeal of your website. While some themes may support these widgets by default, others may require manual installation or configuration. In this particular theme, we're using an editor to work on our layout, pages, and other content elements. This feature allows you to tweak and refine every aspect of your website with ease.

Plugins: A Critical Component

Plugins are another essential component of WordPress, offering a wide range of features and functionalities that can enhance or improve the overall experience of your website. I'm running several plugins for search engine optimization, security reasons, and spam filtering. These plugins work behind the scenes to ensure that your website is optimized for maximum visibility and protection.

Multi-User Capabilities

One of the most convenient aspects of WordPress is its ability to support multiple users. This feature allows you to collaborate with others on blog posts, comments, or even entire websites. Whether you're working on a team project or simply want to share content with friends and family, WordPress provides an easy way to manage access levels and user permissions.

Import and Export Tools

WordPress also offers powerful import and export tools, making it easy to transfer your content to another website or platform if needed. This feature is particularly useful for bloggers who may decide to switch platforms or need to migrate their content to a new site.

Media Settings: A Key Feature

When it comes to image management, WordPress excels. The media settings allow you to define how images are displayed and processed on your website. For example, when uploading an image, WordPress creates multiple versions of the file, including thumbnails, to optimize performance and enhance user experience. This feature is particularly useful for photographers who want to showcase their work in the best possible light.

Other Key Features

In addition to its image management capabilities, WordPress also offers a range of other features that make it an attractive choice for bloggers and content creators. These include:

* Embedding media from other platforms

* Customizing font sizes and styles

* Creating custom menus and navigation systems

* Using SEO tools to optimize search engine rankings

A Recommendation: WordPress for Photographers

In conclusion, WordPress is a powerful tool that offers a range of features and functionalities that make it an ideal choice for photographers. While it may require some tweaking and customization, its flexibility and ease of use make it a rewarding platform to work with. Whether you're creating a portfolio site or simply want to showcase your photography skills, WordPress provides the tools and support needed to produce stunning online content.

Recommendations for Alternative Platforms

While WordPress is an excellent choice for many bloggers and content creators, there are alternative platforms worth considering. For example:

* Poster: A social media platform that allows you to share your work and connect with others in the photography community.

* Tumblr: A microblogging platform that offers a range of features and functionalities for sharing short-form content.

* Facebook: A social media platform that can be used to create a personal website or portfolio.

Ultimately, the choice between WordPress and other platforms depends on your individual needs and preferences. However, with its versatility, flexibility, and ease of use, WordPress is an excellent choice for anyone looking to create a stunning online presence.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes we're going to continue talking about websites for photography today and this is kind of a multi-part series we're doing uh last episode of The Art of Photography we talked about uh building a portfolio website and today we're going to talk about something a little different I want to talk about photo blogging uh now photo blogging is something that I used to do a long time ago was my first photo website was a photo blog and this was in the days before Flickr and 500px and the like and actually uh when flicker came along that's about the time I really lost interest in doing my blog because flicker had a social media component built on and I was meeting other photographers and I was really getting a lot out of that and for various reasons I've decided this year I'm going to go back to doing photo blogging now my photo blog is at blur. nuu it's kind of an unusual URL um I'll put links to the show notes in the show notes to all the stuff I'm talking about today uh so if you go to the art of photography. TV you can find uh all that stuff uh but anyway what I'm talking about here photo blogs and the reason I'm going back to it uh I'm not cancelling out a flicker don't worry uh I love flick flicker for what it is I think it's it's uh it's one of my favorites um however um there's something in my own work that I wanted to get back to that I missed uh from the days when I did photo blogging that I realized that I wasn't getting out of a lot of the web stuff that I'm doing these days and mainly that is the ability to look at my work in a timeline type perspective so a blog post typically is a journal type situation so rather than putting a portfolio of your best work in there I mean I'm certainly the idea is to go do the best work that you can do uh but more importantly what you want to be able to do is is view that work it may be a little more casual it may be more experimental uh it's not something that I necessarily would send a client to um but it's something that I want to be able to look at my work in a Continuum and the reason I want to be able to do that is sometimes uh I found myself I've gotten you know into kind of a creative idea or something that Sparks an image and I make that image and sometimes you move along from it and you forget some of the things that kind of got you excited about it or you know cuz you moved along and you're working on other things and to be able to see you know be able to go back and maybe catch some of those ideas that needed further development uh and then also obviously the success part of it would be to see ideas get developed over time in New work and so the photo blog is just that um you know different people treat them as different things sometimes they're just kind of like a slice of life journal of what a photographer sees dayto day sometimes they can be Project based uh sometimes they can be really conceptual like you know people who do the 365 uh photo project s where you take a photo every day for for an entire year and those are really hard to do but anyway that could be a photo blog and so there's a lot of reasons to do them um in coming back to photo blogging when I had mine earlier there weren't a lot of options that you had you had movable type which is still around and it's actually not a bad platform uh but since then I've adapted to go back to Wordpress and I'm going to come back and talk about WordPress in a second because I think it has a lot to offer particularly for a blog type setup uh if you're looking to do uh just a quick easy um photo blog or any kind of blog for that matter there's some service that services that have come along in the meantime that have really blown the doors open in terms of usability ease all that kind of thing uh the first one I've talked about on the show before which is posterus um and posterus again links in the show notes um I've used post I love it uh post allows you to set up a very quick blog and the kind of really cool thing I think about postersus is you can email posts uh so rather than having to go into a web browser and type all this stuff I can be out using my cell phone and get my shots that way and I can just simply email them to my postest email address and they will display on the site the other thing that's cool about posters is it will feed into other sites so if you have a WordPress site or something like that you can get the to where it auto posts you can even tie it into Flickr uh Facebook um Twitter all those things so basically sending one email to my poster email address and it goes and posts into all these locations and handles media very well so that's one recommendation uh that I've really loved myself another one that I've also used but probably less extensively is is um is Tumblr and Tumblr is awesome and I actually would recommend using Tumblr for a photo blog because it has a view where you're allowed uh to kind of go in and see all your work kind of on one big page in a timeline type fashion which fulfills exactly what I'm talking about uh Tumblr handles other media well uh there's a social layer that's built into Tumblr and both Tumblr and posters are really good options um if you're considering doing a photo blog and you want something that one is free both the services are free uh two it's easy to use three it's versatile so there's a number of good reason s why you would want to use one of those um WordPress is the other one that I want to talk about and I'm going to show you my blog and why I'm using Wordpress to set up the main thing is is you can develop templates definitely in Tumblr pretty well uh to an extent in posters but uh WordPress has been around a while and your content is kind of protected in that form especially if you're doing a Blog that's one thing I like about it the other thing is it's highly customizable and if you've got some coding experience and you're familiar with WordPress you can code your own themes and the theme that I've done for my blog uh as soon as I work out some bugs in it I actually will like to or would like to um make it available as a download so if you want to just use it on your own site you can do that uh it's kind of uh very minimal in design I'm about to show it to you um and that's kind of my point on that so anyway so come on over to the computer and let's talk a little bit about blogging so we're looking at WordPress here and uh I'm going to show you the options that you have when you do a WordPress blog right now we are at wordpress.com and there's essentially two versions that I'm going to talk about there's wordpress.com and then there's also wordpress.org uhcom is the most basic so if you are totally new to Wordpress this is a great place to start uh they will host your blog for free um and they will give you a free blog so the whole thing won't cost you a dime uh there's two Services there's a free service and there's also a paid service and the paid service allows you to do a few more things it gives you a little more storage if you start getting a lot of photos in here uh you get options for doing what they call video press if you need video hosting uh it allows you to do a custom domain name so if you want yourname.com hooked up to it and I think it runs about $100 a year um and you know if you're a power user it's probably not a great option but I would recommend starting here and if you're not familiar with WordPress at all it's the exact same option as the downloadable version which I'm going to show you in a second uh but this is a wonderful place to start uh if you go to wordpress.org you can download the WordPress software and run it on your own server now this does require a couple things it require a domain name so you need to get yourname.com uh it also requires a web host and so you need to contact a hosting company so whether that be somebody like GoDaddy that you register your name through or it' be somebody like media Temple who I use um there's a number of options that you've got dream host there's other other things but you do need a web host to put this and you will download the software um there's a readme file that gives you instructions and you upload it to your web server again this is a lot different than Tumblr or posterus but uh it is also very open this is an open source project so a lot of people uh are working on and constantly developing WordPress which is nice because security issues things like that rather than just trying to build your own blog from scratch you know people smarter than me have figured this out so that's what I like to do so once you've downloaded WordPress you can upload it and this is actually what my blog looks like and I'll kind of tear this apart and talk about it and this is blur. and so I have hosting here and I've got a custom name and this is the template that I designed around this and so my idea like I said I wanted to show my work in a large Continuum of time so you know the newest photo are near the top and the older photos are down below and I wanted it to be very simple so at the homepage there's not a lot of text or anything you're just provided with a series of thumbnails and if I click on one of these it will open and these Go full screen and this is something that was really important to me because I wanted to experiment with full bleed images and so there's some CSS and some JavaScript written in here so if I resize the page the image always resizes and you always see the entire image what is interesting is you are changing the ground size of the image so I'm finding that certain images work others don't uh I have coded options in here so for instance let me see if I can remember which one yeah like okay so like this one um of these apples this is actually a wet plate and uh I scann the whole plate but I wanted these Corners they were really important to see and if I have that go full bleed so there are options in here for displaying your photos at smaller sizes or using what they call full bleed where it bleeds off the corners um the other thing that's cool uh that I put in here is if I click on the toolbar down here I have a get info button and I can actually write and blog about these images that are in here okay and so you know pretty pretty basic stuff uh and the other thing that I did is I let's go back to the homepage I coded some keyboard shortcuts in here and I realized this is a screencast and you can't see what I'm doing but at any time I can use the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard to move between the images I can use the up up Arrow to return to the index and then some little things I use the letter i to get the info and stuff like that so for instance if I hit up takes me back home um and if I go to any one of these images let's say here's the cat drinking away um I can go here and if I'm you know I know you can't see this but if I push the right arrow on my keyboard it will advance to the next image and so on and so forth if I want to go back I can hit the left arrow and keep going and so anyway this whole thing is experimental the whole idea is the design is complete and now I'm going to concentrate on um experimenting with my images so that's the front end or what the visitor sees when uh you know somebody comes to your website now let's look at the back end and basically if you go to a special URL here for WordPress and you log in and I'm already logged in so it will take me there and this is what the what they call the the dashboard and this is the backend this is the content management part of your website and I'm going to kind of quickly go through here what I will do is when I get a few bugs worked out uh that still need to be addressed on um on blur I'll put the template up so you guys can download it and and tear it apart and do what you want with it uh so anyway um I'll talk you through here and this is the same dashboard if you have the free.com version of Wordpress that's hosted with them you still get this in fact they give you a couple more options that are kind of nice in there um WordPress if you if you look at the Le hand side of the screen here this is your main index and this takes you through all the areas of your site so you have posts and so if I view all posts these are all the posts that I've made and they all have titles and descriptions you can put them into categories I'm not interested in that for this but you can do it uh below posts there is what they call Media and if I go to my media library here's all the images that I've uploaded and so you can see that this is separating your content out so I have a a posting and that post has an image that's attached to it each one I can post additional images to it it's a little more advanced uh links I'm not using in a traditional blog you might want to link to other web pages uh Pages I'm using and they're not very many I think I have an about page and a keyboard shortcuts page and that's it but if I want to continue to create pages I do it here and that's reflected the navigation and it it auto updates and it's very nice um the other strong thing there's comments and I actually I'm not interested in doing comments this time around on my photo blog uh I have flicker for that and that social element this is really something that I'm just it's experimenting in public uh so I'm not really interested in doing Co comments at this point um it's just not not something I'm going after this time around but it's there if you want it on a Blog uh if you go under appearance and this is one of the strong things about WordPress and you can see already there's a bug because I'm missing an image but you can develop your own themes but they WordPress calls the design the theme and it comes with two themes installed and you can go get more and there's tons of themes on the internet that you can browse for free you can install them right here uh WordPress is really strong in that regard so what it's doing is it's separating your content from the design and I think that's so important because you may get down the road and a year or two down you decide oh gosh I really don't like this design it's dated I'm tired of it whatever you want to redesign your website well this keeps you from having to rebuild the entire thing you simply rebuild your layout Pages put them in here turn it on and you're done it's that easy um they also have widgets and if your theme supports them I don't have any in this particular theme and there's an editor in here too so you can work on that uh plugins are another big part of Wordpress and I have some uh that I run mainly for search engine optimization uh security reasons and then also um I have one that catches spam so if the Bots there are robots out there that know how to use WordPress and so they're not actually people and they will come spam your blog so it's a good idea to at least get some plugins that will help combat that a little bit um you can have multiple users on here so if I wanted to do a Blog with somebody else uh two people could certainly contribute to a Blog uh there's also some tools in here for Import and Export and then you have all your settings um I want to show you just real quick I'll do some separate videos on settings I just want to show some of the options in here that's particularly friendly with images if I go down to settings and then I select media it allows me to Define in here how big I want the media to to be so what what it does is this if I upload an image into WordPress let's say I'm creating a new blog post um what it does is it creates rendition sets or basically different versions of that file so if I upload a big jpeg image it's going to make a thumbnail size that will crop to a square 120 by 120 and I use that on the homepage so if we go back to the homepage uh you can see that when I upload an image that's the version it uses okay so it's actually versioning your images so it makes the 120 by 120 square um I have I'm not using it in this particular layout but it has the option for three of them so there's a 500 by 500 and then I'm making that that large image the maximum width is 1, 24 and the maximum height is 1024 as well uh so anyway so you can embed from other media Etc and uh anyway uh all good stuff and um anyway I highly recommend WordPress uh it's it's very image friendly uh to do a portfolio site it does require some tweaking as some people have mentioned on Twitter and and I agree with that but I think for a photo blog um it can be easily tweaked into something that uh that works really nicely so there you go photo blogs several different options there tumbler uh WordPress postest uh find one use it uh get out there put your work up uh you technically I guess could use Facebook for something like that if you wanted to do a social media thing but uh you know I know the blog is not a portfolio site so you treat a little bit differently but for me I'm really a retentive and I really care about the quality of my images and how they're displayed and that's kind of I've opted for WordPress it's definitely not the easiest option of the bunch uh but I think it's the most rewarding and it's the most versatile in terms of what you can do with it and I think finally another thing it's not as big a problem with poster as s Tumblr but those Services own your content okay so it's harder to pull that content out if you wanted to very simply move it down to another location or a new blog uh what I like about WordPress is I can move the location I can move the blog and as long as it understands a WordPress import I'm good uh generally I probably using Wordpress so that's not a problem either um but you own your content and WordPress kind of stays out of the way so that's you know it it's just a matter of opinion and uh what you want to do with it but anyway uh that's all for today that's photo blogging get out there make one post photos experiment uh get to know your work and um get better as a photographer so anyway once again this has been the Art of Photography and thank you for watchinghey everybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes we're going to continue talking about websites for photography today and this is kind of a multi-part series we're doing uh last episode of The Art of Photography we talked about uh building a portfolio website and today we're going to talk about something a little different I want to talk about photo blogging uh now photo blogging is something that I used to do a long time ago was my first photo website was a photo blog and this was in the days before Flickr and 500px and the like and actually uh when flicker came along that's about the time I really lost interest in doing my blog because flicker had a social media component built on and I was meeting other photographers and I was really getting a lot out of that and for various reasons I've decided this year I'm going to go back to doing photo blogging now my photo blog is at blur. nuu it's kind of an unusual URL um I'll put links to the show notes in the show notes to all the stuff I'm talking about today uh so if you go to the art of photography. TV you can find uh all that stuff uh but anyway what I'm talking about here photo blogs and the reason I'm going back to it uh I'm not cancelling out a flicker don't worry uh I love flick flicker for what it is I think it's it's uh it's one of my favorites um however um there's something in my own work that I wanted to get back to that I missed uh from the days when I did photo blogging that I realized that I wasn't getting out of a lot of the web stuff that I'm doing these days and mainly that is the ability to look at my work in a timeline type perspective so a blog post typically is a journal type situation so rather than putting a portfolio of your best work in there I mean I'm certainly the idea is to go do the best work that you can do uh but more importantly what you want to be able to do is is view that work it may be a little more casual it may be more experimental uh it's not something that I necessarily would send a client to um but it's something that I want to be able to look at my work in a Continuum and the reason I want to be able to do that is sometimes uh I found myself I've gotten you know into kind of a creative idea or something that Sparks an image and I make that image and sometimes you move along from it and you forget some of the things that kind of got you excited about it or you know cuz you moved along and you're working on other things and to be able to see you know be able to go back and maybe catch some of those ideas that needed further development uh and then also obviously the success part of it would be to see ideas get developed over time in New work and so the photo blog is just that um you know different people treat them as different things sometimes they're just kind of like a slice of life journal of what a photographer sees dayto day sometimes they can be Project based uh sometimes they can be really conceptual like you know people who do the 365 uh photo project s where you take a photo every day for for an entire year and those are really hard to do but anyway that could be a photo blog and so there's a lot of reasons to do them um in coming back to photo blogging when I had mine earlier there weren't a lot of options that you had you had movable type which is still around and it's actually not a bad platform uh but since then I've adapted to go back to Wordpress and I'm going to come back and talk about WordPress in a second because I think it has a lot to offer particularly for a blog type setup uh if you're looking to do uh just a quick easy um photo blog or any kind of blog for that matter there's some service that services that have come along in the meantime that have really blown the doors open in terms of usability ease all that kind of thing uh the first one I've talked about on the show before which is posterus um and posterus again links in the show notes um I've used post I love it uh post allows you to set up a very quick blog and the kind of really cool thing I think about postersus is you can email posts uh so rather than having to go into a web browser and type all this stuff I can be out using my cell phone and get my shots that way and I can just simply email them to my postest email address and they will display on the site the other thing that's cool about posters is it will feed into other sites so if you have a WordPress site or something like that you can get the to where it auto posts you can even tie it into Flickr uh Facebook um Twitter all those things so basically sending one email to my poster email address and it goes and posts into all these locations and handles media very well so that's one recommendation uh that I've really loved myself another one that I've also used but probably less extensively is is um is Tumblr and Tumblr is awesome and I actually would recommend using Tumblr for a photo blog because it has a view where you're allowed uh to kind of go in and see all your work kind of on one big page in a timeline type fashion which fulfills exactly what I'm talking about uh Tumblr handles other media well uh there's a social layer that's built into Tumblr and both Tumblr and posters are really good options um if you're considering doing a photo blog and you want something that one is free both the services are free uh two it's easy to use three it's versatile so there's a number of good reason s why you would want to use one of those um WordPress is the other one that I want to talk about and I'm going to show you my blog and why I'm using Wordpress to set up the main thing is is you can develop templates definitely in Tumblr pretty well uh to an extent in posters but uh WordPress has been around a while and your content is kind of protected in that form especially if you're doing a Blog that's one thing I like about it the other thing is it's highly customizable and if you've got some coding experience and you're familiar with WordPress you can code your own themes and the theme that I've done for my blog uh as soon as I work out some bugs in it I actually will like to or would like to um make it available as a download so if you want to just use it on your own site you can do that uh it's kind of uh very minimal in design I'm about to show it to you um and that's kind of my point on that so anyway so come on over to the computer and let's talk a little bit about blogging so we're looking at WordPress here and uh I'm going to show you the options that you have when you do a WordPress blog right now we are at wordpress.com and there's essentially two versions that I'm going to talk about there's wordpress.com and then there's also wordpress.org uhcom is the most basic so if you are totally new to Wordpress this is a great place to start uh they will host your blog for free um and they will give you a free blog so the whole thing won't cost you a dime uh there's two Services there's a free service and there's also a paid service and the paid service allows you to do a few more things it gives you a little more storage if you start getting a lot of photos in here uh you get options for doing what they call video press if you need video hosting uh it allows you to do a custom domain name so if you want yourname.com hooked up to it and I think it runs about $100 a year um and you know if you're a power user it's probably not a great option but I would recommend starting here and if you're not familiar with WordPress at all it's the exact same option as the downloadable version which I'm going to show you in a second uh but this is a wonderful place to start uh if you go to wordpress.org you can download the WordPress software and run it on your own server now this does require a couple things it require a domain name so you need to get yourname.com uh it also requires a web host and so you need to contact a hosting company so whether that be somebody like GoDaddy that you register your name through or it' be somebody like media Temple who I use um there's a number of options that you've got dream host there's other other things but you do need a web host to put this and you will download the software um there's a readme file that gives you instructions and you upload it to your web server again this is a lot different than Tumblr or posterus but uh it is also very open this is an open source project so a lot of people uh are working on and constantly developing WordPress which is nice because security issues things like that rather than just trying to build your own blog from scratch you know people smarter than me have figured this out so that's what I like to do so once you've downloaded WordPress you can upload it and this is actually what my blog looks like and I'll kind of tear this apart and talk about it and this is blur. and so I have hosting here and I've got a custom name and this is the template that I designed around this and so my idea like I said I wanted to show my work in a large Continuum of time so you know the newest photo are near the top and the older photos are down below and I wanted it to be very simple so at the homepage there's not a lot of text or anything you're just provided with a series of thumbnails and if I click on one of these it will open and these Go full screen and this is something that was really important to me because I wanted to experiment with full bleed images and so there's some CSS and some JavaScript written in here so if I resize the page the image always resizes and you always see the entire image what is interesting is you are changing the ground size of the image so I'm finding that certain images work others don't uh I have coded options in here so for instance let me see if I can remember which one yeah like okay so like this one um of these apples this is actually a wet plate and uh I scann the whole plate but I wanted these Corners they were really important to see and if I have that go full bleed so there are options in here for displaying your photos at smaller sizes or using what they call full bleed where it bleeds off the corners um the other thing that's cool uh that I put in here is if I click on the toolbar down here I have a get info button and I can actually write and blog about these images that are in here okay and so you know pretty pretty basic stuff uh and the other thing that I did is I let's go back to the homepage I coded some keyboard shortcuts in here and I realized this is a screencast and you can't see what I'm doing but at any time I can use the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard to move between the images I can use the up up Arrow to return to the index and then some little things I use the letter i to get the info and stuff like that so for instance if I hit up takes me back home um and if I go to any one of these images let's say here's the cat drinking away um I can go here and if I'm you know I know you can't see this but if I push the right arrow on my keyboard it will advance to the next image and so on and so forth if I want to go back I can hit the left arrow and keep going and so anyway this whole thing is experimental the whole idea is the design is complete and now I'm going to concentrate on um experimenting with my images so that's the front end or what the visitor sees when uh you know somebody comes to your website now let's look at the back end and basically if you go to a special URL here for WordPress and you log in and I'm already logged in so it will take me there and this is what the what they call the the dashboard and this is the backend this is the content management part of your website and I'm going to kind of quickly go through here what I will do is when I get a few bugs worked out uh that still need to be addressed on um on blur I'll put the template up so you guys can download it and and tear it apart and do what you want with it uh so anyway um I'll talk you through here and this is the same dashboard if you have the free.com version of Wordpress that's hosted with them you still get this in fact they give you a couple more options that are kind of nice in there um WordPress if you if you look at the Le hand side of the screen here this is your main index and this takes you through all the areas of your site so you have posts and so if I view all posts these are all the posts that I've made and they all have titles and descriptions you can put them into categories I'm not interested in that for this but you can do it uh below posts there is what they call Media and if I go to my media library here's all the images that I've uploaded and so you can see that this is separating your content out so I have a a posting and that post has an image that's attached to it each one I can post additional images to it it's a little more advanced uh links I'm not using in a traditional blog you might want to link to other web pages uh Pages I'm using and they're not very many I think I have an about page and a keyboard shortcuts page and that's it but if I want to continue to create pages I do it here and that's reflected the navigation and it it auto updates and it's very nice um the other strong thing there's comments and I actually I'm not interested in doing comments this time around on my photo blog uh I have flicker for that and that social element this is really something that I'm just it's experimenting in public uh so I'm not really interested in doing Co comments at this point um it's just not not something I'm going after this time around but it's there if you want it on a Blog uh if you go under appearance and this is one of the strong things about WordPress and you can see already there's a bug because I'm missing an image but you can develop your own themes but they WordPress calls the design the theme and it comes with two themes installed and you can go get more and there's tons of themes on the internet that you can browse for free you can install them right here uh WordPress is really strong in that regard so what it's doing is it's separating your content from the design and I think that's so important because you may get down the road and a year or two down you decide oh gosh I really don't like this design it's dated I'm tired of it whatever you want to redesign your website well this keeps you from having to rebuild the entire thing you simply rebuild your layout Pages put them in here turn it on and you're done it's that easy um they also have widgets and if your theme supports them I don't have any in this particular theme and there's an editor in here too so you can work on that uh plugins are another big part of Wordpress and I have some uh that I run mainly for search engine optimization uh security reasons and then also um I have one that catches spam so if the Bots there are robots out there that know how to use WordPress and so they're not actually people and they will come spam your blog so it's a good idea to at least get some plugins that will help combat that a little bit um you can have multiple users on here so if I wanted to do a Blog with somebody else uh two people could certainly contribute to a Blog uh there's also some tools in here for Import and Export and then you have all your settings um I want to show you just real quick I'll do some separate videos on settings I just want to show some of the options in here that's particularly friendly with images if I go down to settings and then I select media it allows me to Define in here how big I want the media to to be so what what it does is this if I upload an image into WordPress let's say I'm creating a new blog post um what it does is it creates rendition sets or basically different versions of that file so if I upload a big jpeg image it's going to make a thumbnail size that will crop to a square 120 by 120 and I use that on the homepage so if we go back to the homepage uh you can see that when I upload an image that's the version it uses okay so it's actually versioning your images so it makes the 120 by 120 square um I have I'm not using it in this particular layout but it has the option for three of them so there's a 500 by 500 and then I'm making that that large image the maximum width is 1, 24 and the maximum height is 1024 as well uh so anyway so you can embed from other media Etc and uh anyway uh all good stuff and um anyway I highly recommend WordPress uh it's it's very image friendly uh to do a portfolio site it does require some tweaking as some people have mentioned on Twitter and and I agree with that but I think for a photo blog um it can be easily tweaked into something that uh that works really nicely so there you go photo blogs several different options there tumbler uh WordPress postest uh find one use it uh get out there put your work up uh you technically I guess could use Facebook for something like that if you wanted to do a social media thing but uh you know I know the blog is not a portfolio site so you treat a little bit differently but for me I'm really a retentive and I really care about the quality of my images and how they're displayed and that's kind of I've opted for WordPress it's definitely not the easiest option of the bunch uh but I think it's the most rewarding and it's the most versatile in terms of what you can do with it and I think finally another thing it's not as big a problem with poster as s Tumblr but those Services own your content okay so it's harder to pull that content out if you wanted to very simply move it down to another location or a new blog uh what I like about WordPress is I can move the location I can move the blog and as long as it understands a WordPress import I'm good uh generally I probably using Wordpress so that's not a problem either um but you own your content and WordPress kind of stays out of the way so that's you know it it's just a matter of opinion and uh what you want to do with it but anyway uh that's all for today that's photo blogging get out there make one post photos experiment uh get to know your work and um get better as a photographer so anyway once again this has been the Art of Photography and thank you for watching\n"