EP130 – Building a Photography site using WordPress

(00:04) all right what’s up everyone is Jason Tucker episode number 130 today we’re gonna be talked about photography site using something called WordPress let’s go rubber room here real quick and get everyone introduced we’re gonna start enough that a quarter with Chris lemma hi there i’m chris and i am the CT over a company called crowd favorite and i also run the North County San Diego wordpress meetup nice Dave SD Dave I’m CTO at spectrum tech and we build custom plugins and ecommerce stuff very nice
(00:38) will buy you George Stephanis I do minion wrangling run the jetpack pit crew local meetup stuff I have minions nice awesome Patrick haven’t seen you for what 300 episodes it’s done I think I was on on like episode 50 last time it was it’s been about itself um where are you pin taste well cry let hey guys come on let Patrick tells how he’s running with themes come on ah not quite oh yes yes yes it is it isn’t way to do list I’m the product manager for woocommerce so I plan all the stuff that’s coming down
(01:22) the pipeline oh you’ll be except to talk about yeah nice what about you Robert uh my name is Robert Dahl I’m a track ticket lobbyists and no I’m a I’m a web developer over at Robert Dahl calm and i live in canada I know okay oh my god what about you say what about you help me Jason really no really tell me told ya well hey guys my name is J Reid and I do web stuff teach WordPress make wordpress Live Love Field WordPress at savory media on all the things okay so look at you Steve I am Steve zeggen i’m
(02:12) the founder of zeke interactive and run the OC wordpress meetup and tonight is the design meetup it’s looking forward to it what about you Suzette hello everybody I’m Susan I’m a teacher with girl development and I love WordPress awesome what is not we do really i’m william bay I I’m the chief’ll entrepreneur I plant your site we build websites for photographers mainly oh how topical I’m Jason Tucker you’re gonna find me on Twitter Jason Tucker I blog about stuff over w media
(02:47) top crew so who is a nice hug refer in this does it does it look like William is does it look like William is seven feet tall yeah looks like Williams roses Oh though he’s that mean desk more there we go we are the knights the same what solanki python reference yeah so how many peoples are actual photographers not somebody’s my iphone like yeah that would be rationally what’s wrong with iphone photographers though they’re awesome i can ever be well nothing wrong with it it’s just you can’t you know
(03:33) it’s a little harder to uh do you know get the raw version of an image poppin your stove e so cam oh my god but you know like I i have to say that the you know photographers are they are demanding um clientele because they want to see their images really large really big and without any degradation of the MFE however it stop promoting their name automatically over the entire thing to keep anywhere from stealing yes yeah and and i also on all of those people that have you know that kind of steel contact and from reddit and then just post it to
(04:20) blogs and stuff like that on in it you really have a large problem with that same concept another person you can talk to say about that um people still things on me after that yes yes to me that’s really scary quit acting so surprised i dealing alright so we have up we have a few we have a few things here so one piece to this is that will definitely need to talk about you know the idea of making sure you can’t right click on images that’s something that doesn’t happen anymore I hate those types of plugins i know i saw that on
(05:00) and then I’m like so watch this and then I like screenshot it and I’m like did right click and they’re like oh like yeah we’re also going to need to discuss a little bit about you know people uploading raw images and stuff too so where we going sacrus is a family show what kind of photography static you jacket evading clearly World Wrestling Entertainment raw what you can one day off of work so let’s talk a little about building a site where you actually earn some money which means selling those
(05:36) photos and and one of the reasons we have Patrick one of the reasons we have Patrick on is because recently woocommerce rolled out a photography solution and extension that lets you do some of this is that right picture well actually know about this yeah it’s up on our blog and it it does a lot of the painful things that you have to do with images like you take a bunch of images at a wedding or something you want them all grouped on one like product page and it does all that for you is it locked like four okay so here’s my question so
(06:09) I literally just set up a site for a client he’s a photographer and I do this periodically but this one literally was like last week so um you know he’s a photographer he’s just been basically sending people like you know Dropbox links nothing’s automated there’s no download or anything like that so we’re trying to look at like a comprehensive low-cost solution and you know considering smugmug as like maybe like the e-commerce aspect of it and separate from this site is your product that
(06:38) you’re talking about replicate those those features but oh wait one second low low cost his product is 79 bucks I’ll do that’s too much oh man I hear I don’t want to spend any is there enough 30 and you have to get WooCommerce right which is which is how my god that’s constantly really behind it’s 480 commerce was free no one ever said ecommerce was 30 okay we’re not just not necessarily local I so first of all I didn’t know about this new boo themes product so all right so Patrick instead of having say talk more
(07:14) about her client district Ellis does it taste I’m just going to toggle that’s Patrick Patrick tell us tell us about the about the plugin yeah well so if you’ve actually used smugmug it’s actually like that where you see like a list of photos and then you say I want that one that one that one that one and then you press check out and it does all that for you so by you gotta go it rolls out it rolled out in January right uh it may have been early februari but it rolled out early this year um and it
(07:49) rolled out just physical photos at first and digital photos are going to be coming out in the very near future okay incidental downloads how do you do this physical ones they’re just so they’re just let me explain the physical process to me interested just so like with digital products we don’t have like um we don’t have a way for you say right now to say physical product or a digital one or a you know the black and white version and we’re gonna have we’re gonna have a toggle it’ll let you choose the
(08:23) different type of folder you want so so Patrick one of the one of the things I really noticed about photographers is that they all kind of keep their information in the this I ptc data which is kind of metadata associated with a photo how and in wordpress 4.2 i coordinated getting a patch a very small patch in the car that allows that proper of the data how is that related to your plugin with that iptc data that’s an awesome question totally wasn’t expecting that one umm so so it uses the regular WordPress uploader so yep you
(09:15) can upload photos as you would any of our WordPress media and it’ll use that file for a download so it should work as expected perfect perfect like now wait to try that sounds awesome oh how well it’s six years so I would finally finally it was this like it’s done and Patrick how well has it sold the extension good question I don’t I haven’t looked at the sales stats oh no it’s basically you show up on the show completely unprepared I think we also have heard on google and let’s just
(09:53) google the woothemes plugin it’s not like we have the expertise the product manager or anything you know what else all right now like he’s like these guys mostly they joke around the whole half-hour I don’t need to actually have real data I get it I get it but we’ll follow up later Patrick okay um one thing I’ve also talked with Georgia when I when I showed him this art wolfe project I’ve been working on is that one of the things we did was put every photo on to a new page so that the SEO could
(10:29) be great on that page and one of the things in Jetpack that I’ve seen with their gallery is that you don’t necessarily um in all of these gallery plugins they’re all kind of much Don to one page and you don’t necessarily get the SEO from like a grizzly bear um for a yeah that well let’s say like that analogy story with that one what kind of pictures exact you know ok 44 you know like grizzly bear eating salmon in Alaska and stop make yeah you know what uh Robert just takes a down a road that she’s been
(11:22) found to off and you don’t want to go down that one so yeah I’ve got a question my gosh Robert your dick yeah so Robert about about SEO on your pages yeah what is it what is it that you’re doing on those pages because then this pandas come out there’s there’s you know quality content controls that you have to be aware of one photo and a couple of XF information is going to reduce the quality of your site right but so it’s gonna be more than no content on that just a photo so yeah some of us so you
(11:58) have like it like a story or something like that that’s that’s what I do with my fine art stuff is I actually have a story and my WooCommerce pages for for the photographs themselves yeah this happen is that what you’re you’re kind of referring to well I’m kind of referring to um how do we get a good SEO for pitchers that only have like a really small caption associated to it and so um I think you tell people to write more that’s really what it comes down to is you got to write more or or
(12:32) you know what wedding photographers input you know portrait progress which is my primary you know you know clientele oh they’ll do they’ll do a full blog post and they’ll you know have 22 some of them even have like a hundred I don’t get it but some of them have like quite a few photos and they either caption it or the alt tag yet right and they actually have a story above it you know about the wedding we’re about the portraits of Shannon that’s man so it’s a collective so that’s for the little
(13:00) bow file or the portfolio side it’s not necessarily time for example like the pro to blog post okay well whatever but like so the idea is kind of that smugmug functionality is that there are private galleries so say you know there’s a wedding or whatever and you want to upload this so that someone can download them or you know we’re talking are we talking private are we talking SEO talk about private SEO no I well that’s what I’m asking these are obviously different questions I won’t change the topic
(13:31) continue right so so William let’s talk a little about what what your what your process is because obviously you’re doing you’re doing this a lot you have to worry about SEO you have to worry about people who want to potentially make purchases that’s what font is all about right so yeah house what what is it what are the tools what are the tools you’re using to put this together with WordPress so all proofing is done through third-party sites i haven’t found and I’ve looked a little bit of
(13:58) the WooCommerce thing the you know the uploader for glue commerce I don’t think it’s prime time for for my clients you know I could I could talk with Patrick a little bit and let them know what you know like what you know photographers would really want right yeah and beta test by a third party third-party services like smugmug pixie set a zenfolio there’s a couple other that or you know not on the top of my head right now but like those are if you’re gonna do proofing you want to do it through
(14:29) through those you know because you got such an incredible amount of photographs in just gigabytes that you’re going to be uploading at that point right and if you’re on bluehost or you know which a lot of photographers are uh you know or you know other calf to me know yeah godaddy right and you’re gonna end up log it down your whole shared hosting just say no daddy look not all scared us I’m not gonna make me know oh yes yes I will friendly reminder if you are hosting a lot of them to design your
(15:02) site um use jetpack and use photon I’m done yell identical that’s so that is connect for today let’s go for the for the proofing side of things for for the site itself it you know I the custom sites that I build or you know underscores or bones you know start up you know start up there you know I Duke full custom sites and and what what I look at as far as the photography is is the photographs aren’t really what we’re selling as a photographer it’sit’s kind of comes as a shock to a lot of people including
(15:39) photographers and it’s they’re selling themselves they’re selling the hahaha I don’t think that there’s a plugin for that way yeah saysay would come up with that if there was yeah so so they’re actually they’re selling their selling the experience they’re selling their personality so really it’s all about you know bringing themselves to the forefront showing off the personality on the site and then and then this is again because photographers you know again I deal with professional photographers
(16:10) dealing in the portrait wedding space they don’t think of their site as a marketing and an acquisition tool they think of it as a portfolio right and and that’s that’s really where they where they go wrong they got to think of it as you know how do you actually acquire your clientele yeah so a lot of the lot of how I build is very different than other custom site builders and in the photo spaces as I do landing pages I’m you know very clear on service pages that are you know that actually convert
(16:44) that traffic that you’re getting yeah so I missed on it like you do it in photography that’s like your your your stick right you do in u.s. I’ll go tech impact like how do you make a gallery uh SEO friendly late I don’t yeah I don’t care I don’t care about galleries yeah like that’s really it’s knits i’m not selling the photographs and so on yes right but what if what if you were out trying to sell the photographs you know that that’s that’s what that’s how you
(17:15) go to some holy oh oh oh so and so yeah if you’re like a fine art photographer or if you’re you know something in the space of that world that’s completely different I handle sites like that occasionally but that’s that sounds kind of like what what’s in your your we yeah yeah yeahs with dave wolf wait so I have a question SEO related uh in general um when you’re uploading and using the media uploader via you know just for your SEO where she show which there we go hey Jeff right okay oshkosh she’s gonna media it
(17:46) did i do say that what the o Lord you were actually you’re not allowed to touch the media tab ever I have a real question okay what do you do about your attachment page um I don’t I don’t link to the attachment page but I mean it exposed oh let’s not make all these images you have all of these attachment pages or and then do you bother with them do you don’t need to have their say you don’t need to have the attachment pages because you you can set the thing that says hey when you click on this
(18:22) page don’t do don’t move to the attachment page right but the point is all right so here’s here’s how I here’s how I handle the attachment pages I don’t link to them and I don’t index um yeah yep your attachment how do you have to you how do you not indexed your attachment your attachment pages you know stretch which I heard was just bought out by my that was over 40 april fools next year we’re gonna buy with him so hey we tried we tried to buy jetpack but now I bet another can we may say I’m
(19:09) a April Fool’s note for a second I would just like to acknowledge that the main joke at WordPress was that jetpack was gonna include wordpress and I was like we’ve so been there no I don’t get hilarious I was what I’m gonna pin me in advance so i could have like done some joint press release with them ready like we could generate it’s like water cooler calls the future think or whatever we know everything visionary i’m like a soldier so going back to generic going back to what Roberts question was srs
(19:40) for the individual photographs right and this is if you take a look at my site william bay com I have something kind of setup and that would work for you is if you go into the fine art projects and click through to one of the the one of the projects in and actually click one of the images you can see I do i do stories about the image so that’s how I increase SEO is like it has to have forward-facing text you can’t just you know stuff a bunch of alt text in your photo oh you have a bunch of all texting
(20:11) about what what what oh never never in kinda i didn’t want to completely change his subject here but I one thing he does it all the time one one of the things that I was talking about with Morton and Ben lomba at works in recent work camp Seattle was the responsive images in WordPress and that it that it’s gonna be a really tough nut to crack Oh realize but here’s the thing there’s already a ric g respond as an images community group plugin right fork or um there is a feature group on wordpress.org slack in
(21:06) the feature dash rtsp IMG group uh what the current focus is is using the source that attribute to just specify all the available image widths that workers already has generated and letting the browser just choose the one that it looked fast because that’s what source that is meant to do it’s not meant to tell the browser which to you it’s meant to be an offering and it can choose whichever one that feels appropriate this is a lot of ground I thought he was going to say use jet pack sorry I was wearing my core hat not my jetpack hat
(21:43) but the like I think Martin is part of that group at you ah probably um we’ve cried I’m just I’d you know like we don’t have enough time for me to actually explain all the stuff I heard in that conversation at work what is that what’s the question what’s the question about responsiveness well it’s just the that you might say the code in in WordPress to actually get the responsiveness plugins to actually work properly is not necessarily there yet and that’s like in a nutshell what I
(22:24) actually heard are you talking about it’s not so much whether or not the code is there it’s a question of dealing with what images you have because WordPress doesn’t generate new image dimensions on the fly and that’s a rather expensive service what you’re saying yeah so you’re dealing with in the case like you have the large image you’re dealing with the large image all the way down as you scale is that what you’re saying yes a responsibility just basically presents all offerings to the browser in the
(22:50) browser can say oh yes the default may be odd two thousand pixels wide I only need some 200 pixels wide so I’ll just use the smaller one that’s in the source side George doesn’t yes vote on does not already plug go so it’s can I get photon out of Jetpack open source no yeah i have it weird cause yeah the code for the photon sphere is open source you can download it run your own photon server if you reason to not come to do it and provide it for free you need to be connected under jetpack because all you
(23:37) need to be covered out of the terms of service otherwise we wouldn’t have the rights to host your images for you that’s sure gotcha now George what wait I got a question for George Chris take it away George when will when will jetpack do all of the photo gallery by my photo download my phone when will it do proofing when will jetpack do all the things we’re getting regarding photography websites yeah when is it gonna but I have a very simple and clear response for you no soup for you that was a great question Chris thank you
(24:18) woocommerce into jet pack the first thing so what I was talking about when we first started about my client that we were looking at having a smug mug for the the sales and proofing side for the clients who are done with their stuff to look at the portfolio and their their proofs and whatnot is that something that functionality and not worrying about whether or not you have too many images on the server whatever say that’s moved but Patrick is that something that is happening in that theme or in that plugin is that like is that meant to
(24:49) replace smugmug or zenfolio the plugin is supposed to replace smugmug so you shouldn’t have to if you want to run your own on smugmug if you want to sell your own images that’s the way to do it and there’s a million other things you can do to handle all the other problems so if you want a watermark your images there’s a watermark extension if you want to use Amazon s3 to deliver all of your assets you vex upd back any books hey I’m very expensive you don’t have to call it was free so affordable if you if
(25:23) you were in the photography space years ago I’m talking about three four years ago fakeagentuk Wow but I by photographing for 24 years Kris I know but but here what I’m talking about in terms of premium themes if you go back three or four years and premium themes showed up maybe five and a half almost six years ago but if you go back four years one of the only premium themes that was selling for two hundred and some dollars was a photography based theme for photography professionals so they are not the people who are running
(25:57) around going oh my god I needed $29 fein no charging or five thousand dollars at the same time krista krista to like you know cap are to tilt up tail into that so yeah they’ll spend that two hundred dollars but then if you start looking at proofing they want something that’s kind of inclusive like all kind of inclusive with so they don’t have to manage all these extensions and like oh I need this I need that it just kind of nickel and diming they’re not the kind of customers that are going to play along with that
(26:27) well you’re not doing a piece either they don’t we take a baby now talking the theme instead and they just want a solution that works out of the box is sound I’m just saying they don’t need something for thirty dollars they are made under stood you’re making money and if we if WooCommerce here’s the question Patrick right when will woo themes take the bundle of photography watermark anything I’ll put it in one button or a single price is that happening next week mom not me I beta
(26:59) tested my hair what’s chris’s last question right now free stuff is photography doing someone’s actually doing pretty good I look now that I was now that I had look if that was I worked on my head yeah but it’s doing really well so people are buying it using it and we’re getting good feedback that’s awesome that’s awesome great undelivered tapes for sharing that no no seriously so grundles is like the biggest problem with like the extension model like people get people feel like they’re
(27:28) nickel and dimed and that’s it was one of the top three complaints that I of it not quite as bundled when it’s not bundled don’t they feel mickleton what I’m gonna stop one volt so what you’re doing is admittedly saying that your nickel and diming is people right now and your first time really about he’s saying he’s about to roll out a bundle and I heard it you heard it on our show so get to work and when Patrick when Patrick gets invited to the dried cast let’s just be clear day well I got this
(27:59) great idea from WP water cooler and now we’re implementing it ronic hey little too ironic like rain on your wedding day oh are you going to have you tested I think maybe you guys a little match here maybe you need to hook up with Patrick to do some user testing so that it because you obviously know what photographers are looking for both on the fine art and end the photography end and we do here is we match people as we get crazy how this call us WP tinder it’s good that’s why we have dad yeah it’s definitely stay on
(28:45) the show for comments like that I’m here for you guys i’m here for you i got the vapors so we do we have a conclusion yeah I’m conclusion oh it’s complicated do we ever have a conclusion I’m Stan to do feature the show right yeah you know I I really low on the show I have a nice yeah at sa always says it depends well safe says I use depends that’s very different all right this show brought to you by WooThemes and they’re gonna send you know it where things get send us a check but we unfortunately have to send
(29:38) it right back to Patrick because he’s now a superstar needs to be on the show used to be on the show and he was just a regular guy now he’s he’s huge so are the things congratulations by the way Patrick on the new book you just rolled out I saw it on amazon on WooCommerce that is awesome that is a huge undertaking and a really great thing so if you’re watching the show or listening to the show head over to amazon and look up Patrick and the WooCommerce book solution watermark by your pictures
(30:09) that’s about it for today make sure to overlook birthday song toggle this thing off your entire website dokie water cooler calm and check us out there you can hit the subscribe button hit the like button and if you just want to watch this you just want to listen you can subscribe to us on iTunes thank you very much for estimation you say over your face