Allen continued to be an absolute dream to work with. We wanted to give him a special signature brand that he can build his business with and will have the longevity that kind of investment (time and money) deserves. We’re going to work a bit backwards and showcase the custom portfolio WordPress site first. We really pushed the envelope in terms of what a WordPress BlogSite can look like, using only HTML and CSS. We have always felt that it should look as good, if not better than their flash competition. But the functionality… oh, the open and search engine optimized functionality.

Marty Thornley and I had been toying with a retractable menu for a while and Allen was the perfect client to develop it for. We strive to make our custom sites, just that, completely custom, and therefore different from every other photography studio site. The retractable menu allows for extra real estate so you can display your photos. Which is, in fact the point. This is the home page.

The next thing we added was a NO FLASH pop up Gallery that can be updated easily and indefinitely with an unlimited number of galleries that can be displayed anywhere on the site. Therefore, his site can grow with his business.

Because the entire site is powered by WordPress the portfolio sections, the galleries and the blog are all one cohesive system – all editable from the same backend. Plus, because it is a portfolio site first it is portraying the best view of your business. The well known SEO benefits of the blog will draw potential clients not just to your chronological blog but also to your main site. One seamless marketing effort.

The backend is one of my favorite parts. Easy to update, unlike many other CSS sites. The dashboard areas have been tabbed so social media, home page and blog photo galleries can be easily updated.

As with all our sites, we used a combination of amazing WordPress plugins, including a trio of SEO plugins that are freely available and highly recommended for any WordPress site.

• The first on is the famous All in One SEO Pack, the most downloaded of all WordPress plugins.It is very powerful and does too much to explain here. But follow the link to get it and find out more.
• The second is SEO Friendly Images, a great plugin that adds ‘alt’ attributes to each image in your blog posts, all behind the scenes, just install and let it work.
• The third was developed by our own Marty, especially for photographers, called SEO Image Galleries. as an alternative to flash based image galleries. It is all CSS and HTML based and loads every image with SEO information.

Here is a look at the SEO Image Gallery backend:

Finally, the BEST part (did I mention there is NO FLASH). The site looks EXACTLY the same on the iPhone. It is not a duplicate or a mirrored site, it is not a paired down site it is the same site. Exactly the same on all mobile devices. One site to manage so you can go back to that thing that makes your business money…shooting!

View the site live here. Interested in getting your own WordPress custom portfolio site, like Allen’s? Contact us here. In the next few months will be launching affordable WordPress portfolio sites at PhotographyBlogSites.com, with many of these same bells and whistles. Check back for updates, we are currently in Beta Testing.

If your business has a second or third off-shoot with its own site and own blog, you could easily have 4 or more places to login and update. Add to that an order fulfillment service or payment gateway and all the social media sites… That’s a lot. Too much.

You should no longer consider these things as separate entities but should consider them different pieces of a web presence. The more we can consolidate the management of that web presence, the easier our life will be.

Some Goals

Let’s assume for a minute that we can combine our website and blog into one site. Because we can. And we should.

There a few things that we should aim for in this all-in-one site. :

• It should be easy to use.
• It should be able to handle any type of content – video, photos, text, etc.
• It should have great search engine visibility.
• It should allow visitors to connect via:
  • Ability to leave comments
  • Accessible links to social networks and other sites.
  • Feeds from twitter, etc.
• It should publish an RSS feed, which:
  • Allows people to subscribe
  • Can push content to directories and aggregators (great for building links)
  • Can push links to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Some technical considerations:

• No Flash.
  • Search engines can’t read Flash sites.
  • Flash elements, like an animated logo or header are okay. Not the whole page.
• HTML and CSS based.
  • Makes it crawlable by search engines.
  • Makes it visible to iPhone (and now iPad) users
• It should include a Content Management System (CMS).
  • allows a user to update content
  • No need to know anything about HTML code
  • No need to call a web designer every time something needs updating.

WordPress is all of those things.

The Two Versions of WordPress

Just to be clear, there are two versions of WordPress. One is hosted at WordPress.com. One is downloaded from WordPress.org then installed and hosted on your own server. At WordPress.com there is little to no customization allowed and you get yourname.wordpress.com. (While you can pay to point your own domain there, it is not ideal and there are many other reasons not to use that version but that is a topic of its own).

The version you want and the version we use is the self-hosted version from WordPress.org. While typically known as a blogging platform, and at WordPress.com that is all it is, the self-hosted WordPress is fully customizable and can be made to do just about anything.

Looking back at our list, WordPress has all of our requirements built in. We can have portfolio style pages, a blog section with built-in comments, image galleries, and it automatically creates an RSS feed.

And if that is not enough…

Google Loves WordPress

Perhaps the biggest reason to use WordPress is that it takes care of most of the on-page SEO issues that you need to worry about right out of the box. With the right plugins and settings, it can be made to work even better and is in fact recognized by Google as the #1 CMS to use for SEO.

Matt Cutts is the head of the spam (actually anti-spam) department at Google, which makes him basically THE authority on SEO. Why is the head of spam the authority on SEO? Because to combat spam, you need to know the difference between good content and spam and then tweak the Google process for discovering good content. There is probably no one more directly connected to the process of how and why sites rank or don’t rank in Google.

In this video, he does a great job of explaining what Google looks for, why WordPress is ideal and why he uses it himself. He gets into some tech talk but makes it very accessible. It is well worth watching for anyone interested in blogging and/or improving their site’s SEO.

Meet Marty…Marty Thornley is our Gourmet WordPress Chef and Code Connoisseur. He is the programming genius behind our custom portfolio blogsites and is an integral part of the IDK team. Marty will always go the extra mile to break the barriers and create open source sites that work for the unique business models of our clients. He will be writing posts about SEO, social media and all things blogsites. Feel free to leave Marty a comment or email him directly at marty@identitykitchen.com, he generously shares his brilliance and for that we are so grateful.