Two days ago, I mentioned that I was working on a new photography based website for a friend. I've known the guy I'm doing it for for years and even before we discussed the site in any detail, I think I had an idea of the kind of look he'd be after. After talking with him, he confirmed I was right.

The spec. for a the site was a really clean and simple look that he could use to showcase his photography work. He wanted the first page to show a single shot which linked in to a list of galleries. In my previous post, I had a look at some of the gallery plugins available for WordPress and decided to go with kPicasa that links in to Picasa. I'm really happy with how simply this plugin works.

Anyway, getting back to how powerful WordPress is, I was looking for a really simple theme and came across the sliding door theme. I thought, it would be nice to use customised images in the sliding header to personalise the site for Ciaran, strip away the sidebar and just run with a nice plain black site. I had this up and running on the site yesterday, but we had a talk about it and agreed that it wasn't right. I went theme hunting in the WordPress Theme Directory and within 5 minutes came back with the Capricorn Theme by Shaibani. It's really really simple, have a look at a demo of the original theme here and now look at CallumPhotography.com (or below) to see what I've done with it.

The site isn't finished yet but I'm happy enough to let you have a look. I'll be tweaking it over the next week to finish it off to Ciaran's liking and hopefully fix a few layout issues that I'm not happy with. What I like about it so far is that I was able to get this far in one day with WordPress using a very simple theme and a few plugins. That shows the power of WordPress. If I was trying to design a site like this from scratch, I'd be there for weeks, if not months doing it. Even for someone who's familiar with WordPress, it would be hard to spot that this is a WordPress site if I stripped away the links in the footer at the bottom. So with a few hours working on the site and a couple of talks with Ciaran and we're nearly there already. It might not be the best site in the world but he say's it's 'exactly' what he was after so that's good enough for me.

Another great thing about using WordPress for this site (although it's not a typical blog) is that Ciaran can login in to the WordPress control panel and take ownership of the site. This is way better than me asking him for his photos, uploading a bunch of files on to a server and thinking that's the job done. That might work for some people, but for me that's not what it's about. It's Ciaran's site and I'll be helping him get to grips with WordPress and gain a better understanding of how he can edit the site himself to put his own spin on it and keep the site alive! If I handed over a static website that wasn't easily configured he'd get bored with it in a week, but if I give him something to play about with the site becomes his and he's gonna be more interested in growing it. The longer any I site I create remains active and online is only a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

I've also done my first bit of custom coding for WordPress for this one. If you have a look at the homepage on callumphotography.com, you'll see that it displays a random image depending on the time that you load the page. Test this out by reloading the page after about ten seconds and you should see a new photograph up there (it's running 6 different images at the minute). It's nothing spectacular but I'm thinking of customising the code a bit more so that it's easily adaptable for Ciaran to change what images are loaded up at specific times. I'm even thinking of having a go at creating my first WordPress plugin from it. There will be a bit of work involved in this, if I go ahead, but it would be a great experience for me to make my own plugin freely available to the public and to myself for use on other sites.

So this site demonstrates exactly what you can achieve with WordPress in a few days. The look and feel of a custom built site with functionality exactly as per the client requirements. I still have a few issues to iron out on this one and Ciaran needs to sort out his galleries to get some content up there and complete the site but it's not looking to bad at the minute. I also changed the front page on the WordPress site to a static page and included a blog space for him so he has the option of writing about his photographs. We will also look at integrating a way of selling his work from the site further down the line. I've enjoyed working on this one so far and you should expect a few updates on it over the Summer months!