**Choosing Between WordPress and Squarespace for Your Photography Website**

If you're considering creating a photography website, you have several options to choose from. Two popular solutions are WordPress and Squarespace. Both platforms offer unique benefits and can be suitable depending on your style and preferences.

In this article, we'll explore both options in detail, highlighting their features, advantages, and potential drawbacks. By the end of this guide, you'll be equipped with the knowledge to make an informed decision about which platform best suits your needs.

**Squarespace: A User-Friendly Option**

Squarespace is a popular choice among photographers and creatives. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to create a visually appealing website without extensive technical knowledge. Squarespace offers a wide range of templates, many of which are specifically designed for photography portfolios. The platform also features a robust e-commerce system, allowing you to sell your work directly through your website.

One of the most significant advantages of Squarespace is its ease of use. If you're not tech-savvy, Squarespace can be an excellent choice. It offers a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to customize your website without needing extensive coding knowledge. Additionally, Squarespace has a built-in blogging feature, making it easy to share your experiences and insights with your audience.

Squarespace is also known for its sleek and modern designs, which can help your portfolio stand out in a crowded online space. The platform offers a range of features that enable you to showcase your work effectively, including high-quality image editing tools and advanced SEO capabilities.

**WordPress: A Flexible and Customizable Option**

On the other hand, WordPress is a more flexible and customizable platform. It's widely regarded as one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world, with thousands of themes, plugins, and extensions available. This flexibility makes it an ideal choice for photographers who want to create a unique and personalized website.

WordPress offers a vast range of templates and themes that can be easily customized to suit your needs. You can choose from over 100,000 free themes, or purchase premium themes that offer advanced features and customization options. The platform also has a large community of developers and designers who contribute to its growth and development.

One of the most significant advantages of WordPress is its customizability. With thousands of plugins available, you can add any feature you need to your website, from contact forms to e-commerce functionality. This flexibility makes it an excellent choice for photographers who want to integrate multiple services into their website.

**Permalinks and URL Structure**

When using either Squarespace or WordPress, it's essential to understand the importance of permalinks and URL structure. Permalinks refer to the permanent URLs that link to individual pages on your website. In WordPress, you can change your permalink settings in the dashboard, under Settings > Permalinks.

For example, if you're using a custom domain name like bobsmithphotography.com, you'll want to set up permalinks that display your blog post title rather than a cryptic string of numbers and question marks. This will make it easier for visitors to navigate your website and share your content with others.

In Squarespace, you can also customize your URL structure by changing the permalink settings in the dashboard. However, keep in mind that this may require some technical expertise, as Squarespace's permalink settings are not as straightforward as those in WordPress.

**Retina-Ready Images**

Another feature worth mentioning is retina-ready images. Both Squarespace and WordPress offer solutions for displaying high-resolution images on retina screens, such as the new Macbook Pro computers, iPads, and iPhones. In WordPress, you can use plugins like WP Retina 2X to ensure that your images display correctly on these devices.

Squarespace also offers a similar solution, which is built into its platform. With WP Retina 2X or Squarespace's native retina-ready feature, you can rest assured that your high-quality images will be displayed accurately and with clarity, even on the latest mobile devices.

**Exporting Your Website**

One of the benefits of using both WordPress and Squarespace is their transferability. If you start with one platform and decide to switch to another later, you can export your entire website and import it into the new platform.

This feature is particularly useful for photographers who want to establish themselves online but are unsure about which platform best suits their needs. By exporting your website from one platform and importing it into another, you can avoid losing any of your hard work or content.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, both WordPress and Squarespace offer excellent solutions for photographers looking to create a professional online presence. While Squarespace is known for its ease of use and user-friendly interface, WordPress offers more flexibility and customization options.

Ultimately, the choice between these two platforms depends on your individual needs and preferences. By considering factors like design, functionality, and transferability, you can make an informed decision about which platform best suits your photography business.

**Tips and Recommendations**

* Start with a clean slate: Take advantage of both platforms' templates and themes to create a visually appealing website.

* Customize your website: Use plugins and extensions to add features that enhance your website's functionality and user experience.

* Export and import: Don't be afraid to switch between platforms if needed, as exporting and importing your website can save you time and effort.

* Test and optimize: Ensure that your website is optimized for search engines and mobile devices by testing and optimizing it regularly.

By following these tips and considering the features and benefits of both WordPress and Squarespace, you can create a stunning photography website that showcases your work effectively and attracts potential clients.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography and in this episode I want to talk about websites and I want to talk about what your website looks like what my website looks like um the last episode that we did we started talking about what it means to be a professional photographer and what it means you know there are many ways you can do this there are many levels that people do this on maybe you're a full-time professional or maybe somebody is just very part-time and how this differs from being an amateur photographer and I want to make it very clear and you know a couple people made comments about this and I I totally agree with this is that you know skill level is not dependent on whether you make a living as a photographer or not nor does happiness and I think that's really important to say it up front that you don't have to be a working professional photographer in fact I always argue that it may be more difficult once you introduce money into the picture you have deadlines you have things where you have to produce work and it puts starts putting pressure on the artistic side of things and that can be difficult to handle sometimes it's definitely a stumbling block and I think the better professional photographers certainly find ways to get through that but anyway what I'm saying is just because you make a living as a photographer does not bear any resemblance on skill level how good you are how much enjoyment you pull from it those kinds of things but since we are talking about being a professional and what it means to be a professional I want to start breaking this down into some smaller episodes where we can talk and get more into the the details of you know what kinds of things are available how they're defined you know how you break into stuff there is a ton of information people like to do videos and blog about this a lot and some of them are pretty good and there's a lot of misinformation out there too and so hopefully we can look at it from a more analytical approach with some real world examples so that's kind of where I'm going with this but in today's particular episode I want to talk about websites and I think this I I'm going to make an argument here that websites are important whether you're a professional or not it's displaying your work it's having that resource online it's being able to direct somebody to just see your website you could make the argument that things like 500 PX and Flickr do great job of this and they do the only argument that I would say against either one of those platforms and really why not do all of them but you know when you have a situation like 500 PX or Flickr where there's other people on there as well and you really want somebody to focus on your work and not be distracted by you know the more Community aspects of things so that's where I think a personal website differs in a lot of ways I've always kept a personal website um and most of you probably do too and ask yourself this and be honest how often do you keep your website updated is it up to date right now and I'm talking about work I'm talking about your bio I'm talking about just the site in general is it old is it and in all honesty mine has not been updated in a while and that's one of the projects that I've got going this summer is kind of rejiggering my portfolio a little bit adding some new stuff making sure the text and the copy are all updated and so on so forth so I will kind of Chronicle as we're going along and doing that and uh you know you probably will find that interesting as well to see you know as we kind of work on this together but I want to talk about what goes into web website some of the nuts and bolts and from a philosophical standpoint this has always been you know kind of my pitch is that you know even I think you should keep a photography portfolio online and I think you should keep something that is a blog or something similar where you're updating it with new work and I think this is important for a number of reasons one it keeps you moving it keeps you on your game it keeps you shooting photos and it gives you something to strive for so really making sure that your website is current I think is a really big deal I think it's a big deal for nothing else in your process as a photographer that you're sharing that online publicly some people have mixed feelings about this some people aren't as comfortable with that but that's a real and that can be a barrier it can be comfort zone that you're trying to get through so anyway all this to say what I want to do is go over the computer I want to look at some examples and I want to talk about what all is involved with having your own website including expenses and stuff like that so come on over and let's have a look okay so we're going to talk about websites today and up front I want to clarify I'm not talking about doing an account on Flickr or 500px or something like that or even Tumblr those are all wonderful Services there nothing wrong with them but they serve a different purpose there's a social element that's involved and I'm talking about a place where you could send clients to or people who want to look at your work and you don't want them to be distracted by other accounts things like that so having your own website that you can completely control the layout the design the work that goes on here keep it updated keep it fresh a place you can really call your own on the web is very important and that's what we're talking about here today and you know the solutions I'm going to show you I I've had trouble finding anything I mean you're going to have to pay something for these they're finding a free service is I just don't recommend it I think that this is something you don't have to spend a lot of money on it but there just is a little bit of a factor of that just so you'll know and I'll talk about what you need and what you need to pay for and basically there's two things you need for a website you need a domain name so if you're not familiar with that that would be like Ted forbes.com or the art of photography.tv and that's where people used to get to your site and you need hosting which is basically the company that's going to own the servers that serve your files to the internet and I would also recommend that you use some kind of content management system and I'm going to show you how these are kind of bundled together a little bit and none of this costs a lot you can easily do a website for you know web domains cost typically anywhere from nine to Fifteen dollars and up depending on what you know top level extension you have dot coms are usually the most common and you know anywhere from about ten dollars to Fifteen dollars a year is what you're going to spend on that I mean I've just said a month I mean a year um so that's you know that one cost which isn't much and hosting you can find fairly cheaply too and I'll talk about that as we wrap into content Management Systems here now there's two content Management systems that I recommend and we're looking at WordPress right here and we're going to come back to that and look at a little bit of how to in a second another one that I think is really good is a company called Squarespace and I've talked about them on here before Squarespace really do a brilliant job a full disclosure they have been a show sponsor um and but I I would not advertise them if I didn't think highly of them they've redesigned their home pages you can see and it's pretty wild they they have beautiful templates in here they have wonderful design layouts the accounts on here start around 16 a month but you get everything rolled into that you can register for your domain name here and they will take care of that and then everything is drag and drop it really is the most simple user interface so if you really are not into any kind of computer coding and want to make this as simple as possible Squarespace is an awesome place to go and have this done I have a demo account through them that I like a lot literally everything is just drag and drop and you just build your stuff and start with a template and they really have a wonderful system here for doing a website that you know basically is based off of templates but doesn't feel like it they're very photo friendly very photographer friendly they're a wonderful option now they do cost a little bit more they're 15 a month and uh sorry 16 a month and up so that is one way you could go I think another solution that I really like a lot is to use WordPress and now let me talk about this WordPress is is a open source something the software is actually free uh system and there are two versions of Wordpress there's wordpress.com and there's wordpress.org and the.com one is more like Tumblr and that's not the one I'm talking about is the same software but they hosted on the.com you can do everything there um it is for the most part free they upsell you on a few things if you need video features and and the like but you could do it through.com you have more flexibility if you host it yourself and so what you want to do is is you can go through wordpress.org if you already have a hosting service and go through the instructions and show you how to install it the company that I um prefer and recommend to people if you're going to go for WordPress it's a company called Bluehost and I recommend Bluehost because they're very very inexpensive um we're talking five dollars a month so on their home page now with full disclosure on that I do have an affiliate link that you guys can use on this and I will put that in the show notes and basically it doesn't cost you any more money but it just tells them that I referred you and and I do get a kickback from that so you can support the show if you decide Bluehost is what what you want to do Bluehost are great they have a full control panel in here once you get your account and you really don't need any add-ons you can do it on the base account at five dollars a month that's what I've done and basically what you'll do is is sign up for that and then when you log into your control panel they have what they call One Click install so you can just one click install WordPress and it installs it and you're good to go and you don't have to really install anything so much like Squarespace now you don't have to do a lot of coding now within WordPress you do have some really cool options there a ton of like themes out there and stuff you can choose from you can design your own if you are a coder at all you'll probably prefer WordPress because you can code your own stuff into it so it's very very flexible if you're looking for WordPress themes um the one that I usually recommend is a company called theme trust let me get this in here right themetrust.com they have some wonderful photography related themes in here and essentially if you're going to create a photography website you don't want to you might have a Blog on there but you don't want the whole thing to feel just like a Blog which is why I don't recommend some of the other stuff um like wordpress.com necessarily but you want to be able to customize and do your own themes and theme trust just have some amazing stuff in here and I've recommended them it's been a while but I've talked about them on the show before again I'll have a link to this in the show notes and uh if you want to support the podcast you can use that as well some of my favorites and they have some new ones in here e-commerce themes and stuff like that if you want to sell stuff the Hero theme is still one of my favorites you can go in here and view a live demo and basically it's very photo friendly it's got this kind of cool thing where you can do a background image and it works really well and the cool thing about the theme trust themes is let's see if they have it going on right now yeah you can get buy one get one free so you can basically get two themes and try them out and if you're having trouble deciding which one you like very cool great company great support um and between that and Bluehost you are set up with WordPress and you're ready to go and I'll show you a couple things too um about WordPress when you're you know working on it um this is just the front end and the basic theme that WordPress ships with which is very vanilla Plain Jane if I go in here and I go to my WP admin and we'll go ahead and log into this and okay so we are in the WordPress dashboard now and this is where you control your content and I can go visit site and it keeps this admin toolbar on the top of the screen so I can easily add a new post page whatever and I'll talk about how WordPress is set up they're basically different types of content you can put in here you have posts and posts are like blog posts so they're going to file off in chronological order and you know act like a Blog and that's a great way to do you know news updated content learn how to write about your work you know some important things there's also media so we can upload images and deal with that we'll come back to that in a second and then you also have Pages which is more static content I typically do my portfolios in Pages rather than blog posts because they're just different they're not chronological not dependent on each other and then of course you've got comments too if you choose to use those in your website as well and I'll show you real quick because I haven't done this in a video before how easy it is to do a gallery in the new version of Wordpress that's out and so basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to go under new and I'm going to select a new page and we're just going to title this Botanicals and I've got some flower images I'm going to put on here so let's go ahead you can save the draft let's go ahead and publish it and so you can see when you publish it that now I can go visit my website and I now have a link that says Botanicals in here you can delete the sample content that's in here so if I go to Botanicals um what we're going to do is let's edit this page and I'm going to do a couple things here what we're going to do is we're going to add a gallery of images I'm going to show you how easy this is to do if you go down here and say add medium and you can literally drag and drop so let's go back over to the desktop here I'm going to take all these Botanical images and I'm going to drop them onto WordPress and you're going to see that it's going to build thumbnails and go around and do my gallery basically and we're good now what I want to do here is I'm going to create a gallery which is a little different I want all these inserted in the post but we're going to do some stuff with them so I can go over here under create gallery and it's going to give me all my images in here let's say create a new gallery and I can drag and drop these if I want to change the order I can add captions if I want I can do reverse order get everything looking exactly how you want it here's all my flower images and I can just go ahead and say insert gallery and it gives me a little placeholder because we're not looking at the live website it's just telling me there's a gallery there what we're going to do is Click update and now if we go view page you can see that we now have a gallery of thumbnail images in here I want to click on one of them they go to their own page and it works pretty nicely it's pretty cool um and so anyway that's essentially how you would do a gallery the other thing you can do on here see how I have this sidebar over here with comments and categories and all this stuff you may not want that and if I go edit page again if I look over on the right and this is what the default template that ships with WordPress it's very minimal very nice looking very elegant if I go under template I can choose a full width no template no sidebar sorry full with page template no sidebar say update now when I go view page I get a better looking Gallery with no sidebar in it I'm still really not wild about this layout and I'm going to give you guys a little heads up on something I've been working on which I do code with WordPress and I like it a lot if we go over to our dashboard and what I want to do is go down to plugins and let's look at the installed plugins I have a plugin that I'm building just because I don't like the way WordPress handles galleries very nicely but I don't like the way they look and so what I've done is I've created a plugin and I'm actually going to have this available for download it's not ready just yet but if you give me a couple weeks hopefully by mid-summer here we'll be we'll be good to go on this I'm going to go ahead and activate the focus Gallery plugin and all this plugin does is I've written this to go in and basically anywhere it sees an instance of a gallery just to change the way it looks and so if I turn the plugin off and deactivate it it goes back to normal so if it doesn't work or you're not into it or whatever you can always go back it doesn't destroy anything so let's go back and visit our site now and if I look at Botanicals now you'll see that this plug-in the way I like to see them displayed is in columns and I like to be able to control the width of the column which you'll be able to do with the plugin and all that and the other thing that's really nice is it's responsive so if I resize the page you're going to notice that the thumbnails has animation to it even I can go resize what I want that Gallery but everything will lay more evenly on the page and the other thing it does is it rewrites the gallery so when I click on one of these images to view it larger it's going to use lightbox to open it up and display it like that so you don't have to leave the page and go to another page you can just do it here this is just how I prefer to see Galleries and like I said I will have this plugin available eventually it's a little tweaks here and there and we're good to go the other thing you can do which is really nice is if I go under my dashboard I can go change my themes and if you buy one of the themes from theme trust you just upload it to your website and you can do it through here if you go to appearance and say themes you can add a new one and that way if you go to install themes you would go upload your zip file but if we go to manage themes and here's another theme that I'm working on for my my portfolio which is focus.nu on that website I'll put all these links in the show Notes too but if I activate this theme and again this isn't quite ready yet but it's what I'm working on um I go visit site now and it looks like my focus website if I go to my Botanicals page there they are and so you can change the look The feel the layout a lot of themes have options in them so it just depends on what you want to do as you can see there's a little bit more to do with WordPress I think you get more flexibility and you have more ownership over your content Squarespace is different Squarespace is for people who want to really keep it super easy and don't mind paying a little bit more a month to do it both are wonderful Solutions and like I said I recommend them both and you know it just depends on your style and and what you like to do the most important thing is to get your content up get it going be able to organize to be able to look at it objectively like this and get rolling and you know the platform is less important as the is what you're doing with your website so like I said if you want to keep it easy I'd use Squarespace um you know if you're more into the control aspect and want more writing and themes and stuff WordPress is excellent um so anyway a couple other things that I can show you here if you look up at the top of the screen and I'm running this locally on this computer but if I look over at the end of the URL you get this question mark page ID equals 24. this is something you should change when you install WordPress and I'll show you how to do it if you go back to the dashboard I'm going to go under settings and I'm going to go down to what they call permalinks okay and permalinks basically this is what do you want your url to look like and I know it looks sloppy because I'm running it on the Local Host here which means it's just running on my computer it's not actually on the internet but if I go down and I change it just to post name for instance let's save changes let's go back to the website and let's go to the Botanicals page again now you can see the URL up here rather than having a bunch of question marks and numbers um let's say this were on my website it would be Ted forbes.com or focus.nu Botanicals so much cleaner way Google likes this for search um it's easier to send people a link and not have it look crummy it just works really nicely one other thing that I'm going to show you that's really cool and it is also free in here is if I go over to my plugins I've already installed it on here but there's a plugin that you can get for free that's pretty nice called WP retina 2X and this ensures that all your images will display correctly on retina screens and so this includes like the new Macbook Pro computers that have come out that have real high resolution screens iPads iPhones all the eye stuff which has you know retina screens basically if you don't use this plugin things can look kind of grainy and and you know low low quality install the plug-in and basically you have to run it if you've already got images in there but it's real easy to use you'll go ahead and run it and what it does is it ensures when we're actually recording this on a retina screen right now but it ensures that you have the high resolution image in there so nice stuff anyway like I said I will put all the links to the show notes I know this was just kind of a how-to but remember you want to get your domain name so bobsmithphotography.com or whatever your name is you want to get that secured and you can do all this if you decide to go with Squarespace or Bluehost either one um and they're transferable and so is all the content WordPress so if you start WordPress and decide you want to upgrade to Squarespace later there's a way just to export your entire website and bring it right into Squarespace Squarespace which saves a lot of time and Hassle and you know I like these two solutions because it's easy to move between them they're both very user friendly and um you know I just think that there there's some good stuff going on there both so this is we've looked at both WordPress and Squarespace Okay so we've covered a lot of information on photography websites here today and I hope you've gotten something out of this and hope the takeaway is that you know it's really important to do your own thing it's it's really important to have your own site and it's really important to view your body of work in a way I think objectively that you want to push yourself to do better you want to you know further your boundaries and your own abilities and I think being able to look at your work in a context like that particularly as public and you can get feedback from others is really important so anyway if you have a website I would suggest you know taking a couple months here this summer and really focusing on tightening up that portfolio getting it current if you don't have a website start somewhere start from scratch I've given you all the tools today so get out there and make something happen anyway once again guys this has been the Art of Photography thank you for watching I will see you guys next time laterhey everybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography and in this episode I want to talk about websites and I want to talk about what your website looks like what my website looks like um the last episode that we did we started talking about what it means to be a professional photographer and what it means you know there are many ways you can do this there are many levels that people do this on maybe you're a full-time professional or maybe somebody is just very part-time and how this differs from being an amateur photographer and I want to make it very clear and you know a couple people made comments about this and I I totally agree with this is that you know skill level is not dependent on whether you make a living as a photographer or not nor does happiness and I think that's really important to say it up front that you don't have to be a working professional photographer in fact I always argue that it may be more difficult once you introduce money into the picture you have deadlines you have things where you have to produce work and it puts starts putting pressure on the artistic side of things and that can be difficult to handle sometimes it's definitely a stumbling block and I think the better professional photographers certainly find ways to get through that but anyway what I'm saying is just because you make a living as a photographer does not bear any resemblance on skill level how good you are how much enjoyment you pull from it those kinds of things but since we are talking about being a professional and what it means to be a professional I want to start breaking this down into some smaller episodes where we can talk and get more into the the details of you know what kinds of things are available how they're defined you know how you break into stuff there is a ton of information people like to do videos and blog about this a lot and some of them are pretty good and there's a lot of misinformation out there too and so hopefully we can look at it from a more analytical approach with some real world examples so that's kind of where I'm going with this but in today's particular episode I want to talk about websites and I think this I I'm going to make an argument here that websites are important whether you're a professional or not it's displaying your work it's having that resource online it's being able to direct somebody to just see your website you could make the argument that things like 500 PX and Flickr do great job of this and they do the only argument that I would say against either one of those platforms and really why not do all of them but you know when you have a situation like 500 PX or Flickr where there's other people on there as well and you really want somebody to focus on your work and not be distracted by you know the more Community aspects of things so that's where I think a personal website differs in a lot of ways I've always kept a personal website um and most of you probably do too and ask yourself this and be honest how often do you keep your website updated is it up to date right now and I'm talking about work I'm talking about your bio I'm talking about just the site in general is it old is it and in all honesty mine has not been updated in a while and that's one of the projects that I've got going this summer is kind of rejiggering my portfolio a little bit adding some new stuff making sure the text and the copy are all updated and so on so forth so I will kind of Chronicle as we're going along and doing that and uh you know you probably will find that interesting as well to see you know as we kind of work on this together but I want to talk about what goes into web website some of the nuts and bolts and from a philosophical standpoint this has always been you know kind of my pitch is that you know even I think you should keep a photography portfolio online and I think you should keep something that is a blog or something similar where you're updating it with new work and I think this is important for a number of reasons one it keeps you moving it keeps you on your game it keeps you shooting photos and it gives you something to strive for so really making sure that your website is current I think is a really big deal I think it's a big deal for nothing else in your process as a photographer that you're sharing that online publicly some people have mixed feelings about this some people aren't as comfortable with that but that's a real and that can be a barrier it can be comfort zone that you're trying to get through so anyway all this to say what I want to do is go over the computer I want to look at some examples and I want to talk about what all is involved with having your own website including expenses and stuff like that so come on over and let's have a look okay so we're going to talk about websites today and up front I want to clarify I'm not talking about doing an account on Flickr or 500px or something like that or even Tumblr those are all wonderful Services there nothing wrong with them but they serve a different purpose there's a social element that's involved and I'm talking about a place where you could send clients to or people who want to look at your work and you don't want them to be distracted by other accounts things like that so having your own website that you can completely control the layout the design the work that goes on here keep it updated keep it fresh a place you can really call your own on the web is very important and that's what we're talking about here today and you know the solutions I'm going to show you I I've had trouble finding anything I mean you're going to have to pay something for these they're finding a free service is I just don't recommend it I think that this is something you don't have to spend a lot of money on it but there just is a little bit of a factor of that just so you'll know and I'll talk about what you need and what you need to pay for and basically there's two things you need for a website you need a domain name so if you're not familiar with that that would be like Ted forbes.com or the art of photography.tv and that's where people used to get to your site and you need hosting which is basically the company that's going to own the servers that serve your files to the internet and I would also recommend that you use some kind of content management system and I'm going to show you how these are kind of bundled together a little bit and none of this costs a lot you can easily do a website for you know web domains cost typically anywhere from nine to Fifteen dollars and up depending on what you know top level extension you have dot coms are usually the most common and you know anywhere from about ten dollars to Fifteen dollars a year is what you're going to spend on that I mean I've just said a month I mean a year um so that's you know that one cost which isn't much and hosting you can find fairly cheaply too and I'll talk about that as we wrap into content Management Systems here now there's two content Management systems that I recommend and we're looking at WordPress right here and we're going to come back to that and look at a little bit of how to in a second another one that I think is really good is a company called Squarespace and I've talked about them on here before Squarespace really do a brilliant job a full disclosure they have been a show sponsor um and but I I would not advertise them if I didn't think highly of them they've redesigned their home pages you can see and it's pretty wild they they have beautiful templates in here they have wonderful design layouts the accounts on here start around 16 a month but you get everything rolled into that you can register for your domain name here and they will take care of that and then everything is drag and drop it really is the most simple user interface so if you really are not into any kind of computer coding and want to make this as simple as possible Squarespace is an awesome place to go and have this done I have a demo account through them that I like a lot literally everything is just drag and drop and you just build your stuff and start with a template and they really have a wonderful system here for doing a website that you know basically is based off of templates but doesn't feel like it they're very photo friendly very photographer friendly they're a wonderful option now they do cost a little bit more they're 15 a month and uh sorry 16 a month and up so that is one way you could go I think another solution that I really like a lot is to use WordPress and now let me talk about this WordPress is is a open source something the software is actually free uh system and there are two versions of Wordpress there's wordpress.com and there's wordpress.org and the.com one is more like Tumblr and that's not the one I'm talking about is the same software but they hosted on the.com you can do everything there um it is for the most part free they upsell you on a few things if you need video features and and the like but you could do it through.com you have more flexibility if you host it yourself and so what you want to do is is you can go through wordpress.org if you already have a hosting service and go through the instructions and show you how to install it the company that I um prefer and recommend to people if you're going to go for WordPress it's a company called Bluehost and I recommend Bluehost because they're very very inexpensive um we're talking five dollars a month so on their home page now with full disclosure on that I do have an affiliate link that you guys can use on this and I will put that in the show notes and basically it doesn't cost you any more money but it just tells them that I referred you and and I do get a kickback from that so you can support the show if you decide Bluehost is what what you want to do Bluehost are great they have a full control panel in here once you get your account and you really don't need any add-ons you can do it on the base account at five dollars a month that's what I've done and basically what you'll do is is sign up for that and then when you log into your control panel they have what they call One Click install so you can just one click install WordPress and it installs it and you're good to go and you don't have to really install anything so much like Squarespace now you don't have to do a lot of coding now within WordPress you do have some really cool options there a ton of like themes out there and stuff you can choose from you can design your own if you are a coder at all you'll probably prefer WordPress because you can code your own stuff into it so it's very very flexible if you're looking for WordPress themes um the one that I usually recommend is a company called theme trust let me get this in here right themetrust.com they have some wonderful photography related themes in here and essentially if you're going to create a photography website you don't want to you might have a Blog on there but you don't want the whole thing to feel just like a Blog which is why I don't recommend some of the other stuff um like wordpress.com necessarily but you want to be able to customize and do your own themes and theme trust just have some amazing stuff in here and I've recommended them it's been a while but I've talked about them on the show before again I'll have a link to this in the show notes and uh if you want to support the podcast you can use that as well some of my favorites and they have some new ones in here e-commerce themes and stuff like that if you want to sell stuff the Hero theme is still one of my favorites you can go in here and view a live demo and basically it's very photo friendly it's got this kind of cool thing where you can do a background image and it works really well and the cool thing about the theme trust themes is let's see if they have it going on right now yeah you can get buy one get one free so you can basically get two themes and try them out and if you're having trouble deciding which one you like very cool great company great support um and between that and Bluehost you are set up with WordPress and you're ready to go and I'll show you a couple things too um about WordPress when you're you know working on it um this is just the front end and the basic theme that WordPress ships with which is very vanilla Plain Jane if I go in here and I go to my WP admin and we'll go ahead and log into this and okay so we are in the WordPress dashboard now and this is where you control your content and I can go visit site and it keeps this admin toolbar on the top of the screen so I can easily add a new post page whatever and I'll talk about how WordPress is set up they're basically different types of content you can put in here you have posts and posts are like blog posts so they're going to file off in chronological order and you know act like a Blog and that's a great way to do you know news updated content learn how to write about your work you know some important things there's also media so we can upload images and deal with that we'll come back to that in a second and then you also have Pages which is more static content I typically do my portfolios in Pages rather than blog posts because they're just different they're not chronological not dependent on each other and then of course you've got comments too if you choose to use those in your website as well and I'll show you real quick because I haven't done this in a video before how easy it is to do a gallery in the new version of Wordpress that's out and so basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to go under new and I'm going to select a new page and we're just going to title this Botanicals and I've got some flower images I'm going to put on here so let's go ahead you can save the draft let's go ahead and publish it and so you can see when you publish it that now I can go visit my website and I now have a link that says Botanicals in here you can delete the sample content that's in here so if I go to Botanicals um what we're going to do is let's edit this page and I'm going to do a couple things here what we're going to do is we're going to add a gallery of images I'm going to show you how easy this is to do if you go down here and say add medium and you can literally drag and drop so let's go back over to the desktop here I'm going to take all these Botanical images and I'm going to drop them onto WordPress and you're going to see that it's going to build thumbnails and go around and do my gallery basically and we're good now what I want to do here is I'm going to create a gallery which is a little different I want all these inserted in the post but we're going to do some stuff with them so I can go over here under create gallery and it's going to give me all my images in here let's say create a new gallery and I can drag and drop these if I want to change the order I can add captions if I want I can do reverse order get everything looking exactly how you want it here's all my flower images and I can just go ahead and say insert gallery and it gives me a little placeholder because we're not looking at the live website it's just telling me there's a gallery there what we're going to do is Click update and now if we go view page you can see that we now have a gallery of thumbnail images in here I want to click on one of them they go to their own page and it works pretty nicely it's pretty cool um and so anyway that's essentially how you would do a gallery the other thing you can do on here see how I have this sidebar over here with comments and categories and all this stuff you may not want that and if I go edit page again if I look over on the right and this is what the default template that ships with WordPress it's very minimal very nice looking very elegant if I go under template I can choose a full width no template no sidebar sorry full with page template no sidebar say update now when I go view page I get a better looking Gallery with no sidebar in it I'm still really not wild about this layout and I'm going to give you guys a little heads up on something I've been working on which I do code with WordPress and I like it a lot if we go over to our dashboard and what I want to do is go down to plugins and let's look at the installed plugins I have a plugin that I'm building just because I don't like the way WordPress handles galleries very nicely but I don't like the way they look and so what I've done is I've created a plugin and I'm actually going to have this available for download it's not ready just yet but if you give me a couple weeks hopefully by mid-summer here we'll be we'll be good to go on this I'm going to go ahead and activate the focus Gallery plugin and all this plugin does is I've written this to go in and basically anywhere it sees an instance of a gallery just to change the way it looks and so if I turn the plugin off and deactivate it it goes back to normal so if it doesn't work or you're not into it or whatever you can always go back it doesn't destroy anything so let's go back and visit our site now and if I look at Botanicals now you'll see that this plug-in the way I like to see them displayed is in columns and I like to be able to control the width of the column which you'll be able to do with the plugin and all that and the other thing that's really nice is it's responsive so if I resize the page you're going to notice that the thumbnails has animation to it even I can go resize what I want that Gallery but everything will lay more evenly on the page and the other thing it does is it rewrites the gallery so when I click on one of these images to view it larger it's going to use lightbox to open it up and display it like that so you don't have to leave the page and go to another page you can just do it here this is just how I prefer to see Galleries and like I said I will have this plugin available eventually it's a little tweaks here and there and we're good to go the other thing you can do which is really nice is if I go under my dashboard I can go change my themes and if you buy one of the themes from theme trust you just upload it to your website and you can do it through here if you go to appearance and say themes you can add a new one and that way if you go to install themes you would go upload your zip file but if we go to manage themes and here's another theme that I'm working on for my my portfolio which is focus.nu on that website I'll put all these links in the show Notes too but if I activate this theme and again this isn't quite ready yet but it's what I'm working on um I go visit site now and it looks like my focus website if I go to my Botanicals page there they are and so you can change the look The feel the layout a lot of themes have options in them so it just depends on what you want to do as you can see there's a little bit more to do with WordPress I think you get more flexibility and you have more ownership over your content Squarespace is different Squarespace is for people who want to really keep it super easy and don't mind paying a little bit more a month to do it both are wonderful Solutions and like I said I recommend them both and you know it just depends on your style and and what you like to do the most important thing is to get your content up get it going be able to organize to be able to look at it objectively like this and get rolling and you know the platform is less important as the is what you're doing with your website so like I said if you want to keep it easy I'd use Squarespace um you know if you're more into the control aspect and want more writing and themes and stuff WordPress is excellent um so anyway a couple other things that I can show you here if you look up at the top of the screen and I'm running this locally on this computer but if I look over at the end of the URL you get this question mark page ID equals 24. this is something you should change when you install WordPress and I'll show you how to do it if you go back to the dashboard I'm going to go under settings and I'm going to go down to what they call permalinks okay and permalinks basically this is what do you want your url to look like and I know it looks sloppy because I'm running it on the Local Host here which means it's just running on my computer it's not actually on the internet but if I go down and I change it just to post name for instance let's save changes let's go back to the website and let's go to the Botanicals page again now you can see the URL up here rather than having a bunch of question marks and numbers um let's say this were on my website it would be Ted forbes.com or focus.nu Botanicals so much cleaner way Google likes this for search um it's easier to send people a link and not have it look crummy it just works really nicely one other thing that I'm going to show you that's really cool and it is also free in here is if I go over to my plugins I've already installed it on here but there's a plugin that you can get for free that's pretty nice called WP retina 2X and this ensures that all your images will display correctly on retina screens and so this includes like the new Macbook Pro computers that have come out that have real high resolution screens iPads iPhones all the eye stuff which has you know retina screens basically if you don't use this plugin things can look kind of grainy and and you know low low quality install the plug-in and basically you have to run it if you've already got images in there but it's real easy to use you'll go ahead and run it and what it does is it ensures when we're actually recording this on a retina screen right now but it ensures that you have the high resolution image in there so nice stuff anyway like I said I will put all the links to the show notes I know this was just kind of a how-to but remember you want to get your domain name so bobsmithphotography.com or whatever your name is you want to get that secured and you can do all this if you decide to go with Squarespace or Bluehost either one um and they're transferable and so is all the content WordPress so if you start WordPress and decide you want to upgrade to Squarespace later there's a way just to export your entire website and bring it right into Squarespace Squarespace which saves a lot of time and Hassle and you know I like these two solutions because it's easy to move between them they're both very user friendly and um you know I just think that there there's some good stuff going on there both so this is we've looked at both WordPress and Squarespace Okay so we've covered a lot of information on photography websites here today and I hope you've gotten something out of this and hope the takeaway is that you know it's really important to do your own thing it's it's really important to have your own site and it's really important to view your body of work in a way I think objectively that you want to push yourself to do better you want to you know further your boundaries and your own abilities and I think being able to look at your work in a context like that particularly as public and you can get feedback from others is really important so anyway if you have a website I would suggest you know taking a couple months here this summer and really focusing on tightening up that portfolio getting it current if you don't have a website start somewhere start from scratch I've given you all the tools today so get out there and make something happen anyway once again guys this has been the Art of Photography thank you for watching I will see you guys next time later\n"