Archive for WordPress

Photocrati Acquires the NextGEN Gallery WordPress Plugin

By Trevor Current
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

If you’re not familiar with Photocrati, they make one of the most popular WordPress themes for photographers. With over 60 styles to choose from right out of the box, you’re sure to find a look to fit your design taste and get a website up and running quickly. The team at Photocrati are photographers themselves so they know what the community wants. They have over 12,000 photographers using their theme to power websites and online galleries.

After 6 months of work, Photocrati is happy to announce the acquisition of the NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin. NextGEN is one of the most popular gallery management plugins for WordPress and has been downloaded over 5 million times. Photocrati is working to combine the best of their theme and NextGEN into one powerful solution for photographers.

NextGEN will act as the underlying engine for gallery management in version 5.0 of the Photocrati theme. This will give users a lot of new functionality including, centralized gallery management, custom cropping of thumbnails, and watermarking of images. Photocrati-style functionality will be applied to NextGEN giving you the ability to display galleries using Photocrati slideshow, thumbnail, filmstrip, blog-style and e-commerce style displays.

Photocrati has been working on the integration of NextGEN into their theme for months but have not yet announced a release date. They plan to move into the testing stage mid-summer and are looking for beta testers.

For more information about Photocrati’s acquisition of NextGEN Gallery and to become a beta tester, please give their website a visit.

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Categories : Inside WordPress, Plugins
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Marketing Campaigns for Photographers – Build a Non-Photography Site

By Michael Shilling
Friday, June 10th, 2011

This marketing campaign isn’t for the faint hearted and requires a considerable amount of commitment but it’s fruit can ultimately be plentiful and delicious (financially speaking).

Over the past few months and completely down to PhotoCreative365 I gained a reputation within my small community as ‘the WordPress guy’. I’m certainly no expert on coding or anything like that but I’ve tested many a plugin and checked out hundreds of different templates. This puts me in an adventitious position in terms of knowing and finding suitable tools that a site might need. A few months ago I offered to give a mum’s community and support group’s website a complete overhaul. As baby and child portraits have kind of become my thing in 2011 this was the perfect type of group for me to align myself with.

As I mentioned before….. this was not a small project and I certainly learnt a lot in the process but now I’m part of a site and a community that fits perfectly into my target market.

Read More→

Categories : Grow Your Business, Marketing Campaigns
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Websites for Photographers: Why You Need One & How To Create One: by Robert Brandl

By Guest
Friday, May 6th, 2011

Finding new clients is a big part of being a freelance photographer. It is even harder when you are starting out and have yet to make a name for yourself. Some of the channels you can use to build your reputation include phone, email, word-of-mouth, and networking. But one channel in particular works harder than all the rest.

A website is the bedrock of all your marketing efforts and even targets clients while you sleep. This makes it the ultimate client acquisition tool for the successful freelance photographer.

To ensure your website is working hard for you, make sure it:

  • Has good content related to your specialist area. This will attract the attention of search engines.
  • Builds up a good collection of links to other photographers.
  • Effectively communicates your unique brand.
  • Looks professional.
  • And, of course, is a showcase for your best work.

Photographers and technology

Some freelance photographers love technology and are happy to while away their evenings fine-tuning websites and updating blogs. For others, knowing how to use image editing software is as far as it goes.

Open-source system WordPress.org is probably the most popular website platform among freelancers. It is very easy to use once it has been installed and fitted out with a template.

WordPress’s biggest advantage is that it has an endless supply of plugins and extensions. This means the sky really is the limit in terms of functionality. It has its drawbacks too, though. It needs to be updated on a regular basis to keep your website secure, which is a bit of a hassle – not to mention time-consuming. Thankfully there are easier options. Read More→

Categories : Guest Bloggers, Make Better Photographs
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Want Some Free Promotion Just for ReTweeting?

By Trevor Current
Monday, January 31st, 2011

We’re adding new features all the time to help make your experience on CurrentPhotographer.com better. We’ve been testing this one for a while but wanted to make the official announcement. As part of our new features for 2011, we’ve added a plugin called Twitoaster to our website. Twitoaster is a great little plugin that searches through the Twitter stream for Tweets that are connected to our blog posts. When it finds them, they get added to the posts through comments.

Unless you own a super blog like Mashable.com, the days of 50 to 100 comments or more per post are gone. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t reading and commenting, they’re just doing it in differently.

Social networks have changed the way we interact. More conversations are happening on Twitter and Facebook than ever before. If you run a blog I’m sure you’ve noticed a drop in comments over the last year or so. The Twitoaster WordPress plug helps capture the Twitter conversations surrounding your posts and pulls them into your blog. This makes it easy to continue the conversation on the blog and the Tweets are available for everyone to read. Read More→

Categories : News and Reviews
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Tools for Your Photography Business – Software and Online Presence

By Michael Shilling
Friday, November 5th, 2010

There are dozens of tools you’ll need to set up a successful photography business. The bad news is that simply owning a nice camera doesn’t make you a professional photographer…… although sadly some folk seem to think it does!

We’re going to be looking at some of the essential tools you’ll need to acquire in at least the first year (if not the first month) of your business. There are cheaper alternatives to some of the suggestions I make but my advise is buy the best you can afford otherwise you’ll end up paying twice for it.

Many of the suggestions are in fact free so I am suggesting some the cheapest tools you can source! In time you’ll make upgrades but these suggestions are a good place to start.

Part 1 – Software and Online presence

In this section we’re going to be looking at your businesses digital presence and just some of the software you’ll be needing. Of course there are dozen of other programs and applications that I use that I’m not going to mention here but this is just dealing with the essentials.

Photoshop

I’m going to start off with the most obvious as it really has to be THE essential tool for a photography business. Lightroom and Aperture are both great tools but if I had a choice of only one then I wouldn’t think twice about shouting Photoshop at the top of my lungs.

The reason this is such an easy choice for me is that running a photography business is not just about processing images. You’re going to be doing lots of design work that other software just isn’t built for.

Photoshop does also have the advantage of working very well with other programs. At a later stage you’ll be adding other programs like InDesign or the very powerful (and free) PhotoJunction from Queensbury then Photoshop works wonderfully with both.

In the beginning Photoshop is probably going to be one of your most expensive acquisitions, but know that even Photoshop Elements can be upgraded to a full version eventually if cash is tight. Read More→

Categories : Grow Your Business
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A New Opportunity to Sell More Images with iStockphoto

By Trevor Current
Monday, August 16th, 2010

iStockphoto LogoAug 16, 2010 – If you’re in to shooting for microstock then you’ve undoubtedly heard of iStockphoto.com. They recently rolled out a new website design that makes the site much faster to use and added new backend functionality that will offer some amazing new features in the near future. iStockphoto is the place to go for designers and bloggers looking for great quality images at reasonable prices.

Now there is a new opportunity for photographers to sell more photos through iStockphoto with the release of the WordPress iStockphoto plugin. The plugin allows bloggers to find, purchase and insert images directly into their posts without having to leave the admin area. Making the process of finding the images easier will encourage bloggers to use it more and will end up purchasing many more images than they normally would. Below is a press summary with more details about the WordPress plugin. Read More→

Categories : News and Reviews, Web Photo Services
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