Wordpress Based Websites

[F8&Bthere]

After finally getting a real web hosting account, I had been playing with various website ideas. I like the polished look of many Flash photography websites, but I'm learning that they are falling out of favour for a few reasons: mainly that they can be slow, and that they don't tend to be search engine friendly. I kinda like the notion of the slow part being not only from the visitor frustration point of view, but beyond that being almost a "green-tech" trend towards bandwidth conservation, looking toward the future.

Aside- I do know it's kind of silly that every other person seems to have a website these days, even if there is no professional component to it, and blogs are a dime a dozen. But I've always enjoyed writing and dabbling in websites along with my major crush on photography, so a website of some sort was a sure fit "toy project" for me- even if it only gets a couple hits a month. It is only costing me my own time and about $75/year including the domain name.

So, a few nights ago I'm listening to a podcast from a pro wedding photographer named Kerry Garrison, the cast is called Camera Dojo or something like that. And his guest was a web developer guy named Marc Fuller. And he was really plugging Wordpress as being more than just a blogging platform. He was pumping it's search engine optimization advantages, it's flexibility, ease of set-up and other qualities. I knew that my Godaddy hosting account had several freebie add-ons, and that one of them was Wordpress, so I just had to try it. Lots of learning curve over the last few days, but here's the result:

f8 Photo Canada

[JAS_Photo]

Cool stuff, F8! Nicely set up and organized. congrats on the Pentax acceptance as well. I hate their website though, it is just too slow.

[russ]

good luck f8, Wordpress is a pretty straight forward CMS and it's likely more than what most people need. The biggest plus is of course the price, free!

[Bambi]

it's a beautiful blog F8! nice work

[F8&Bthere]

... I hate their website though, it is just too slow.

Yeah, isn't it though? That's a good example of one reason some people are anti-flash. It's eye candy slick, but can be slow.

@Russ- thanks, yes this is all pretty new to me, but I was surprised at how Wordpress, along with any one of piles of free themes available, can produce a fairly decent looking site, for even a noob like me, without hiring a pro. My thing up until this discovery was that I wanted a site, but not badly enough that I would pay somebody to make it for me. And the free Godaddy banner infested template-based sites I tried were unexciting to say the least.

Thanks Bambi!

[Mad Aussie]

Looks cool F8.
Neat to see some of the fancier widgets being used as well. I chose to stay away from those to start with, wanted a cleaner, more matter of fact look, but have been comtemplating a sliding gallery.

Great work for a few days effort.

[F8&Bthere]

Hey, thanks MA and yes I packed a lot of learning into just a few days.

[Marko]

Very clean F8 - Nice!

Wordpress is extremely powerful and can run just about any type of website.
THIS site will be redesigned within a few months and aside from the BB, wordpress will likely drive it all.

[Mad Aussie]

The new Joomla is impressive also.

[JAS_Photo]

Getting slightly off topic but when you change the forum over would it be possible to have dark grey or black backgrounds to show off the photos rather than the white? Or possibly a choice of two skins so anyone can choose which they prefer to use?