Powerful, easily editable, customizable beyond blogspot, just got a new release that is the cats meow, and it's free. Oh, and non of that stupid, yourname.blogger.com crap. It's all about you! =o) Not wordpress.
BTW - http://www.prophotoblogs.com/ Best Wordpress/photographer theme out, I know the fella that programmed it... SO worth the investment. Spencer Bourup uses the same, I use it, tons of use use it. =o) Everything you can think of it editable!
Lucky_Dog wrote:
Wow.... I'm searching and becoming hopelessly overwhelmed.
Are there any decent free or cheap photography templates out there? My budget is in the tank for a bit -- $179 is simply not in the cards right now.
There are good free templates out there.
Are they easily customizable ? No.
Simply Jared with prophotoblogs.com created version 1, last year. Great stuff. He just revised and released version 2, and he built a fully tunable backend.
It's SO worth the money. I got an upgrade price, but I'd gladly pay 179 for it again.
My advice would be to start your blog up with a decent, free template to begin with. Then after you kind of break things in and get used to it, consider buying something better.
I dont see any real reason to drop $180 on day 1 just because everyone in the forums says you should. First make sure the whole "blog thing" is for you before you spend the money. There is no rush.
You might look at Xanga. AFAIK, it's not very popular with pros (mostly teenage girls, from what I can tell) but it is very customizable, and it's free. They offer picture hosting as well. Here's the blog of a fellow FMer, I hope he doesn't mind posting it up here: http://blog.wayneyuan.com/
Prophoto is THE BLOG. Anything not prophoto should be free.
With that said, start with Wordpress. They're super customizable, more crisp boldy looking, and have a lot of support.
I did my prophoto blog in 2 days - installed on servers and managed content. Something that took me about a week to figure out with smugmug. Not putting smugmug down, which is another very interesting and powerful tool. I just hate messing with CSS and HTML. That's why I have prophoto + bludomain and then some smugmug
WP is the way to go. Thing about WP themes is that they ALL use the GPL license, and as such, are free to be sold, borrowed, traded, transferred or given away as the users see fit....nothing against prophoto, its a nice template, but you are paying for something that can be given to you by anyone that has it. There is no copyright on wp themes as they all use the common gpl license. You are free to do with it as you wish.
Once you get any of them, you can pick up some basic css knowledge pretty easily just by changing some things and seeing where/what it does...ie fonts, image sizes, site width..all are fairly easy to figure out. Some stuff is a little harder, but not impossible.
Once you play a bit, you'll hone in on what you want from your blog...ie column widths, colors, backgrounds, fonts and such....
I have one website based on a free blog template with wp HERE for a bridal magazine I publish. I did all the changes myself...still a couple bugs to work out...but its coming along....and I'm by NO means overly literate in css editing....
bb
Brad Barr wrote:
nothing against prophoto, its a nice template, but you are paying for something that can be given to you by anyone that has it. There is no copyright on wp themes as they all use the common gpl license. You are free to do with it as you wish.
This is Jared, the creator of ProPhoto blog theme.
Nothing against Brad Barr, but be careful not to follow his advice here, as he is wrong and you can get yourself in serious legal trouble.
ProPhoto emphatically does not use the GPL license. There IS some debate as to whether PHP files (specifically those that call WordPress functions) from themes inherit the GPL license of WordPress, but there is no debate that the CSS, Javascript, and other types of files from premium themes like ProPhoto DO NOT inherit that same license. Premium themes like ProPhoto are useless without the rest of the file types, and if you distribute those files you are violating copyright and breaking the law and subject to legal action.
If there is any community in the world that should respect the sanctity of professional digital content from unauthorized duplication, it should be photographers.
so prior to jumping in and doing the ProPhoto 2.0 theme for $180 - which there's clearly no debate is THE way to go...
can you use a "free" wordpress blog and use a domain name and hosting to create it's address? then down the road a bit import the content into ProPhoto as you feel you're able to drop the cash ?
I am an IT guy (with a photography hobby) and have setup many wordpress sites for photographers. I like ProPhoto, but one I have just found that I love and is much cheaper and pretty simple to customize is GraphPaperPress an example of one is my Blog.
A good free one that several of the sports guys use over at SportsCorner is Redoable, specifically, uses it. Mark Rebilas.
Also, please install a wordpress blog on your webhost. For professionalism sake, do not use a "soandso.wordpress.com" blog. Something like jford.net/blog looks MUCH more professional.
If you have any questions about installing one please ask, I am more than willing to help.
It's really important what you do with the blog too. We have a blogspot that we started on July first and have had almost 13,000 hits. What matters bit time is how you market yourself with it.
We have heard that wordpress is WAY more customizable. We will most likely move to one that is directly linked with our site once we get the RSS feed figured out. That way we can have 100% control over it.
Blogspot works fine for me, though I heavily tweaked the template I found. If you know CSS/HTML, then just download a template similar to what you have in mind and then edit the CSS to make it exactly what you want.
? give me a flippin break.