Wordpress for photographers

curiousb

I am wondering what people use for their own photographic websites? Specifically in terms of selling images, either digital or print?

I am setting up a Wordpress site for a client who is a photographer and who wants to sell products from his website. He currently sells photos through SmugMug but would like to do it all from his own website.

I'd like it if we could display the SmugMug photos on his site and have a shopping cart to sell both the digital and print versions.

Is anyone here using such a system? Or can you suggest alternatives?

Any advice is much appreciated!

Kenny Logins

This is worth having a look at. I haven't had a close look myself, but it looks interesting.

http://www.squarespace.com/templates/?q=photography

squareballoon

I have a wordpress site and I sell digital products through Pulley. People pay through paypal and Pulley gets the digital product to them. http://pulleyapp.com/

the_doctor199

Kenny Logins wrote: »

This is worth having a look at. I haven't had a close look myself, but it looks interesting.

http://www.squarespace.com/templates/?q=photography

I'm in the process of moving from Wordpress over to Squarespace and I can't recommend it enough. My site is just about ready to launch and it was finished within 2 hours or so, including importing over 200 blogs from my WP.

If you 100% want to stick with Wordpress, there's a Graph Paper Press plugin that will do it.

achtungbarry

Hi curiousb,

I have a Wordpress photography website. I love the fact that I can have a personalized design that looks exactly as I want it. I have tried photography specific website providers (such as Zenfolio) but found the lack of customization features and poor SEO off putting.

For sales, I have an account with Fine Art America. I have found that FAA is by far the best option for selling prints online. You can sell framed, canvas, acrylic and metal prints. There is a huge choice of framing options and sizes, and delivery is worldwide. You can also set your own prices at anything above the base price which means you actually keep the vast majority of the profit. You also get a 15% commission on frames sold with your work.

In the galleries on my own website, each photo has a link underneath saying 'Click here to buy a print' and this takes the user to the sales page for that photo on Fine Art America. This seems to be working well for me as I make regular sales in this way.

Hope that helps and gives you some ideas. Best of luck.

dinneenp

fotomoto will allow you to add several buy options to every photo if you want. It's free I have it in my blog section

I also use Ecwid in my buy printspage. It's great, very easy to set up, good shop feel to it- example.
It's not free though. It allows you to add a 'buy prints' tab to Facebook, which is simple and cool- see my Facebook page
There's multiple solutions out there, many free plugins for wordpress and ones mentioned above.

MaggyM

Photocrati.com offer a very customisable wordpress theme that also allows you to sell.
You host yourself, and it is a once off affordable fee.

My website (link should be in sig below) uses it if you want a look, I just don't have the e-commerce part of it live but i'm sure loads of the testimonial links on their website do.

Ballyman

I use WordPress for a few websites and then photo cart from picturespro for the e-commerce side of things. Its not the cheapest solution in the world but once you buy it its yours with no monthly fees etc. so in the long run its much much cheaper than zenfolio or smugmug and anyway it pays for itself straight away with a few sales!

Have a look at a WordPress site here - www.atl-photobooth.com - and the photo cart is through the clients link. I've set mine up so you need an account to access it (anyone can create an account) but you can set it up anyway you want as its highly editable. If you have any questions let me know.

curiousb

Thanks so much to everyone who replied with all your suggestions.

I have a multitude of options to check out now, most of which I wasn't aware of yesterday!

frostie500

The other option would just be to have the smugmug account forwarding to the wordpress site. Have it set as photos.domainname.com and you'd have everything using the same domain names and tidy. May not be an ideal solution but it would certainly be a working solution and quick and easy to do

curiousb

frostie500 wrote: »

The other option would just be to have the smugmug account forwarding to the wordpress site. Have it set as photos.domainname.com and you'd have everything using the same domain names and tidy. May not be an ideal solution but it would certainly be a working solution and quick and easy to do

I like this idea as he is already using SmugMug and we wouldn't need to change that.

Zillah

Do y'all process in CMYK for prints or just trust a conversion process somewhere along the way?

curiousb

Zillah wrote: »

Do y'all process in CMYK for prints or just trust a conversion process somewhere along the way?

I'm setting up this site for a client and I don't have experience of photographic printing this way, but for other client print requirements, I always convert to CMYK myself and adjust accordingly. I've seen some awful results from bad automated conversions, particularly in the brighter colours.