The Photography Pages » making websites

Testing Embedded Slideshows

TPP — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:36:27 +0000

The vagaries of the beloved WordPress, and forcing what is really a word/text based publishing platform to do stuff for photographs and photography is always a bit of a test, to be honest. This morning’s self-imposed task was a) to upgrade to version 2.8.6; b) to upgrade 4 Plugins (all manually); and c) to teach myself to create embedded slide shows, integrating with Lightroom.

This embedding lark is really for the portfolio site at brendaburrell.co.uk, after watching my German hosts struggling to see the portfolio site’s slideshows through the clickable link in the leading photos. But of course it’s all going to be useful here too.

After some heavy Googling, I found the Kimili Flash Embed Plugin and pretty much followed the guidelines set out here by Marco Ryan. It seems you need to upload two copies of your Lightroom slideshow from the web module, one with the index file, and another with it removed. You do this via an ftp client of course, although in this case, the original ‘/Cornwall’ gallery was already online. So one’s called one ‘/Cornwall’ and the other ‘/Cornwallembed’. There may be a more sophisticated way of doing this, but at the moment I’m not sure what the Dickens that might be.

The path to the one without the index file goes in the html of the page, right here. Took me several tries to realise that we don’t have a /loader in our (UK?) version: it’s called /viewer, but with that blinding realisation, the path is therefore ‘/Cornwallembed/viewer.swf’. Bingo!

Of course the size and shape of the slideshow, and the sheer quantity of photos in this Cornwall slideshow isn’t right for this particular template, but yes, I’m rather happy with it. And thought my lovely readers might like a glimpse of those warm summer days back in 2008.

So that’s a) and b) completed manually. The next thing is to try and work out how to get WordPress and its Plugins to do that much-loved two-click upgrade. Have removed a strangely named file index.php.wpau.bak (?) from outside WordPress that may have had something to do with recent failures, but also, may not. Any suggestions there would be very gratefully received, as always.

Task c) is almost there. Some tweaking yet, but what do you think?Similar Posts:

The Thingummy-Bob

TPP — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:30:40 +0000

It’s a pre-requisite, of anyone who’s asking for help with something, to have a rough idea what it is they’re asking. The thingummy won’t do the whatsit. Every single trade, every small specialism has its coda, its terminology, names for the components unique to this or that moving part, this or that tool.

WordPress is no different. And although it often seems like a monstrous impenetrable engine, it’s actually less of a machine than a tool, or a series of tools. And since it is open-source, made by lots and lots of people all doing it for love, WordPress can sometimes feel cobbled together, patched, slightly worn in some places and with odd bits missing.

After the fear and trembling over the many hacked blogs in version 2.7 a bit back, we were assured that the latest versions are pretty much secure. And we were promised easy-to-do upgrades. One or a couple of clicks.

The devs are absolutely aware how tiresome it is to have to download a new copy of WordPress every time they fix something. Plugins, too. It was okay when we only had to do that once a year, or so. But when these upgrades come as often as one a month, and if you have say 20 Plugins (the add-ons that deliver extra functionality, Share This buttons are an example) and it’s not uncommon to have a lot more than 20 Plugins, phew that’s a lot of messing about at the back end that the average blogger would rather spend blogging.

So, this morning in the boiler room here there were 3 Plugins needing upgrades, and Version 2.8.5 ready and waiting with an alert in pale yellow at the top of my screen.

So that’s 4 distinct lots of messing about downloading and putting files in the right place, powering up the ftp client and uploading, then going into each one and activating. And that’s just the plugins. Has the two-click upgrader ever worked? No. So nowadays when you have a question, you ask Twitter.

@brendadadaWould anyone out there have a simple explanation/solution as to why my #WordPress upgrades & Plugins won’t do it automatically?

Back came the very sensible and helpful reply

@publicenergy@brendadada It might be the folder access rights where the plugins are held – my wp-content & plugins are 755 (write by owner, every1 read)

And

@publicenergy @brendadadaAll Wordpress installation should be 644 – executable by server, except the ones that get uploaded and changed – wp-content

File permissions have change modes – chmod is the abbreviation. These modes set permissions for who can and who cannot read, write and/or execute changes to your WordPress files. Basically, when you’re the owner and signed in, you need to be able to read, write and change almost anything, but visitors perhaps only need to read and/or write.

To make sure the Plugins and the WP versions can be upgraded from within, it’s essential that some things would have to be executable by someone else, so the chmod permissions become more open. With us so far? Yes.

So up with Cyberduck and the file permissions are upped appropriately and within seconds, this blog has disappeared. No 404/403/503 error messages, no dashboard, no sign-in page, nothing, nowt, nada, zilch. As if the tap’s been turned off, nothing.

@brendadadaMagic disappearing blog Can the people with my ftp details please help? And anyone else with advice?

Stef Lewandowski is a web entrepreneur and one of the heroes behind BCCDIY, which if you’ve not been following, is a basically a do-it-yourself and far nicer version of Birmingham City Council’s new £28m website. He makes lots of other nice things too, including a site for daddies, often with a baby on his knee. Here’s his advice, as a list. It’s really helpful.

1. Get your ftp client up and back up ALL the files from the site. Don’t over-write your last backup, you might need that. Do a new one, so you have at least two copies, your previous one and this new one, the one where the problem is.

2. If you think you’ve been hacked (and we thought upping the File permissions might have exposed a bit of nasty script from that previous hack) get a copy of TextMate (which has a helpful 30 day free trial) and use ‘find’ to search for anything containing ‘execute’ or ’script’. It could be that a bit of php script is hidden inside a jpg, so make sure you tell TextMate to see all files.

3. Delete that file. Re-install wordpress and restore from a clean copy, saving only the wp-config file and wp-content.

4. Change all your passwords. Change mysql and FTP user passwords. Goes without saying really, but especially if you suspect a hack.

5. Once the blog’s back up install WP Firewall Plugin and also WP Database Backup ( with settings for amazon S3).

Great advice – do them. Phew.

Except it didn’t all work quite like that, and we really don’t know why. The lovely Josh Hart, creator of Livebrum, sauntered onto the scene, whistling (I think) at about 11.30 and upped the file permissions again, the ones I’d dropped back down earlier. He thinks it’s possible that the original changes didn’t ’stick’ leaving some of the permissions at 000 which of course would mean no read/write/access for anyone.

Luckily there is no sign of a hack.

At least not that we can see…

And the whole thing reminded me of oil and coil, springs and flywheels, gaskets and accumulators, governors and gimlets.

I remember asking my mother why Gracie didn’t know what her thingummybob was called, seemed pretty ludicrous to this enquiring 5 year old. She said it was a wartime secret, that nobody knew what they were making in these huge armaments factories all over the country. And that you’d better not ask because even if you did know, it’d be a secret.

We were down for about two hours altogether this morning, that’s all. Thank you @publicenergyand @stefand @joshhart. WordPress is great. It’s the open source people who make the thingummybobs, I love ‘em all.

So: to the big question, still unanswered:

Would anyone out there have a simple explanation/solution as to why my #WordPress upgrades & Plugins won’t do it automatically?Similar Posts:

Dirty Cash

TPP — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:22:40 +0000

Adsense is here. For the first time ever (screams of horror), there are adverts on this website.

I know, look- I’m really very sorry. Last time this was mentioned, we’d been approached by Adorama and that other lot, B&H, both of whom were vying to offer between 3 and 5% of any sale they made from an advert here. One of them even sent me a ‘typical’ page we could copy – a huge page of expensive plastic camera pictures, all clickable-through to their shopping pages. Ugh.

I could never advocate anyone buying one of those big plastic DLRs, and would hate to inadvertently be the cause of any new camera purchase, let alone profit from the exploitative gadget-head trade. Definitely never, ever is there going to be any of that, no way. Promise.

But, for a while now, the referral logs here have been showing lots of page views from searches for images. Not surprising, really. It’s what makes the site work, after all. These visitors hang around only long enough to screencapture or download a picture. They’re not looking at the site, definitely not reading anything, there’s not time, and the vast majority of them, well probably all, never come back.

In this pie chart from Google Analytics (of the first couple of hours of its implementation today), direct traffic is from people who have bookmarked the site or typed it into their browser. The referring sites slice of pie is people who land here after seeing the url on another website (maybe my portfolio site), or in a link on my name when commenting somewhere, or on a blogroll. There’s also quite a bit of referral traffic coming in from people who’ve created a link to a post or article. The blue and the orange pieces of pie are great, the kind of incoming traffic everyone likes and really wants to encourage.

Trying to work out how to show adverts just to people who come Googling for free images, the green piece of pie, and not to anyone else, has been a tad tricky. There’s a plugin called Who Sees Ads and although more than 16,000 of them have been downloaded, my copy just doesn’t want to work, even after much frustrating wrangling.

So, I asked @peteashtonbecause I remembered some time back that he’d mentioned a way of filtering things so that regular visitors don’t see any adverts, which is what we want. What Would Seth Godin Do works on a cookie. It’s been set to show an advert panel containing a Google Adsense box above each post and each page. It’s there now. If you can see it, either you’re a first time visitor, or it’s your first visit since it was installed. Refresh the page, and it’ll be gone. For good and forever. The only time you’ll see the adverts again is if you log in from another computer, maybe at work, or perhaps from your phone, or if you have cause to clear your cookies. The second time, again it’ll be gone.

Of course if you read The Photography Pages via RSS there are no adverts, and there never will be any adverts on any of the feeds, ever.

It’s been a difficult few months: the studio and darkroom have cost a fortune, and travelling and whatnot, plus a couple of bills that aren’t being paid (more on that tomorrow). There probably won’t be much income, but it’s all going to help keep the darkroom going, pay the heating bills. The conscience is troubled, but not so much when the pennies will be only by dint of visitors who come looking for a free image bank.

So if you see an advert anywhere, just refresh the page. Whatever you do, don’t click on it. If it doesn’t disappear after a refresh, please do let me know. It’s an experiment, and hopefully only for a short time. Thank you.Similar Posts:

Malicious Hack

TPP — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:35:39 +0000

If you haven’t yet heard, there is a rapidly spreading hack of WordPress.org installations running deeply into our databases, and hard to fix. If you haven’t upgraded to version 2.8.4 yet, do so right now, before you finish reading this.

There’s something rather romantic, heroic about a poacher. The idea that all that rolling land, all our rivers, are owned by someone, and usually by someone so disgustingly rich they eat and drink the kinds of foods never seen by their tenant farmers or any local villager, is pretty abhorrent, really. But when the poacher attempts to steal your minute little hard-won corner of the internet, it’s quite a different story.

The current issue involves a rogue admin which creeps in via some faulty code and sets up an invisible super-user account. Here’s the git wot got in here overnight:

If your pretty date/name permalinks have been changed at all, or you have any funny or unfamiliar code in them, check your subscriber list. ‘JesusWesson63′ there was an invisible admin. If you have an invisible admin, the count on your admin user page will be one more than the names of your own familiar real life admin people listed. Page through to your most recent subscriber, and add (or subtract) one number to the ID in the url, until you find something resembling the page above, and search for the name in your subscriber list, then delete the thing.

There’s more here and there will no doubt be plenty coming on WordPress itself and further advice appearing online as this thing progresses in the course of the next few hours.

Please let everyone know. Tweet them, and mail or text all your WordPress-using friends, especially if you think they only drop in on the internet at work during the week.

Many, many thanks to my uber-geek knitting collaborator Lisa @risager for her support and help this morning. I’m off to put on my combats and away to try and catch a trout.

Update:
There’s been an announcement from Matt Mullenweg at WP. It’s more detail on how this happened, and urges us to upgrade. Please pass on, and/or the url to this blog post and make sure all your friends know to upgrade to 2.8.4, and maybe offer help if you can.

Update #2
This morning I noticed a drop of about a 3rd in the count from Feedburner of people who read this blog via RSS. On checking the url in the plugin settings, it had been changed. Do check all your settings via the various menus before you assume all is well again, and good luck. Similar Posts:

400th Post in this Iteration

TPP — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:48:23 +0000

This blog has been going since 28th Feb 2007, such a short time in the scheme of anything, but worth remarking upon since this is the 400th post. There were other blogs before: this whole site moved domains at least twice; there was something on Moveable Type installed by the very lovely (now) professional blogging expert Pete Ashton, and some primitive looking handmade things before that. Just goes to show: nothing ever disappears entirely from the glorious world wide web.

So, 400 posts over roughly 31.5 months = 12.69 posts per month = around 3 posts per week. Crumbs. Especially since there was a long pause whilst the undergraduate wounds were deeply inflicted. And that doesn’t include anything sitting in the drafts box (several words about photos screened in the Baltic, several undergrad progress reports, one or two grumbly things worth keeping but definitely not worth sharing, and few posts taken offline (eg that Boro nuisance). Nor does it include Pages – 20 of them. That feels like a lot of blogging.

Everyone likes statistics. Here are some reader favourites.

Most downloaded files:

1. The Exposure MAT (.pdf file)

2. This nifty little Zone Ruler

Those two have been downloaded a couple of hundred times between them. This is particularly satisfying since the people using the likes of zone rulers and cardboard handmade exposure calculators are definitely The Photography Pages’ kind of people. We love you.

Most downloaded photos:

This one remains overwhelmingly top with downloads in the many hundreds, although since it was linked via the previous domain name, it hasn’t been available for a while. So for all you lovers of layers and car parks, here it is again. It’s not actually a Gursky: you all do know that, don’t you?

Second favourite:

Third:

Lovely women, both. We thank them most kindly! So might you, if you have one of them on your fridge door. After that there are a batch of downloads of tickets and passes for things like Private Views and openings of exhibitions, plus a couple of maps.

Most searched words or phrases

“Children smoking” (and all its variants) is streets ahead. Then model release forms, 35mm camera/s, cross processing, photography degree, and a host of ad hoc film and technique terms. The interest in or disgust about children and smoking far outweighs the furore caused by the Baltic’s censorship of Nan Goldin’s portraits of children, although we were careful to dissuade the spiderbots with unique some changes in spellings.

Most searched people’s names

Michael Ormerod (many from students looking for inspiration for the annual competition for his Trustees’ Award), Graham Stouph, Amanda McHale, Maggie Murray, and just recently a huge number of searches for Antony Chambers, most of them coming from an IP in lovely auld Darlington. Caused such a spike in the stats that it was worth noting as a Facebook update. There was nothing to see here about Antony Chambers, so the link to his website was added in order that this desperate searcher could have somewhere to land.

The Photography Pages doesn’t have a searched-for article or articles about either Graham Stouph or Jacky Longstaff, although that might change, especially if we write about bromoils at some point, since there’s one of Ms Longstaff’s bromoil prints in the gallery at No 7. Amanda McHale’s Dec ‘07 interview is still here, you’ll be glad to know.

Dolores Marat has been searched for a handful of times, by folks looking to find out what kind of camera she used. Makes us all want to crack out the chrome and roam around the Pigalle at midnight.

Browsers

42.2% of readers used some version of Firefox, which is fab because the site renders really well in FF3 and upwards. Download yours HERE. It’s beautiful, it’s free, it’s open source and you can open tabs and add Greasmonkey. Your life will never be the same again. The dismally inferior IE is still strong, probably from old machines or the antediluvian grubby beige-box public sector. Let’s hope it’s all those poor wageslaves having a quiet moment to fulminate about puffing 5 year olds, or to find out how to load grandma’s film camera. Lovely.

Feed Reading

One big change from the early iterations of this blog has been the upsurge in reading via RSS Feeds. Really Simple Syndication was barely known back in 2007, but now it’s pretty certain that most of any blog’s regular readers, you much-loved precious returning visitors, will be looking through their own system, and never visiting the site at all. Tearing one’s hair out about themes, colours, page layout, fonts etc is pretty much redundant these days, thankfully.

Feedburner with its WP plugin handles the post and pages’ RSS feeds, and the numbers are steadily climbing back up to the point they were at in 2008 when the domain names were changed and everyone fell off. Feedburner is also more sophisticated now, so the reader count fluctuates more often. This week it’s rolled around between 65 and 75 readers using feeds, and as you can see the favourite by a long way is now Friend Feed, which has taken over from Google Reader as top. No idea about Toluu – chip in if that’s you. Good to see Bloglines is still alive, though barely, and we don’t know whether that means we’re on 4 blogrolls or there’ve been 4 reads from them today.

Flash Galleries

There are many Lightroom-generated galleries behind the photographs on these pages, so although avid photography consumers do click through to those, they’re outside of the WordPress architecture so the statistics for those are a little more obscure to determine. And they’re in Flash, which is almost universally hated by people looking to buy photographs: gallery owners, collectors, picture libraries, editors and the like. And Flash isn’t supported by the iPhone so we can’t show those galleries to people when we’re on the move.

Hard to know why we like them so much, but we do. Of the people we see “in real life”, these have been popular:

And this one’s a top referral link:

And finally, the

All time top posts/pages:

Here they are, in reverse order -

10. Michael Ormerod – His Legacy from June 2008

9. Brenda Burrell the tabbed link to my professional site making an impact on the stats for the first time

8. Ephemeral Discourse – a new post this week. Crazy, but true.

7. Eleven iPhone Apps For Photographers this one’s likely to build as the trackbacks gain in traffic

6. What To Do If You Inherit a 35mm Film Camera

5. Alex and the plonkers in the Medway Plod – glad this one’s doing so well. Keep on trucking, Alex!

4. Nineteen Useful Things To Know About Using Slide Film. Yes, people do like lists.

3. Do I Need To Obtain A Model Release? A recent surge of traffic from an airgun user’s bulletin board, would you believe.

2. Priscilla Smoking © Joseph Szabo long after the controversy over dismal photohosts deleting photographs of children with a tab in their pretty little mouths, there is still a very significant interest in this. The photograph doesn’t get lifted, surprisingly enough.

And ta-daaaaa! Number One, by a long, long way:

1. Toscani Tested – humble undergraduate essay, worth a mighty 86% from your local semi-sentient tutor/technician. WARNING: If you hand in your work on CDRom or DVD it will be scanned to check for plagiarism, and even if you scramble all the words, it’ll still show as coming from right here. Be careful.

So, maybe there’ll be another roundup in another couple of years, another 400 posts from now. Perhaps by then we’ll all be thinking into a cloud of fairydust or pushing buttons on our cardigans to record the latest brain-blip or Twitter will have taken over the world, or all of the above. In the meantime, and as ever, feel free to Ask Me, if what you’re looking for isn’t here.

Thank you for reading. We really do love you all.Similar Posts:

Naked Seeing

TPP — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:24:59 +0000

So, why the prolongued hiatus, huh? It’s all too diverting to blame busy, or ennui. Instead, this is my personal list of what not to blog:

1. Rantings
~~Cross, grumpy, or even just grumbly. About the state of the industry. Wah! 7,000 photography students graduating, and they all have a camera, and point them at stuff!~~

2. Gearhead
~~The latest kit. Detailed descriptions of black plastic functionality VS dark grey plastic functionality. Thirds, primes, Amaxon links. Prices and price comparisons.~~

3. Gripes
~~How crap people are who do 1 and/or 2.~~

4. Copywrong
~~Bleat whine groan whimper someone stole my photo wot I put on the internet.~~

5. Direct whack
~~Them over there is rubbish.~~

6. Direct whack rencontrer
~~On the other hand, my pictures is really great.~~

7. Pointing
~~This has already been posted by 43 others in a round hall of mirrors, all the same, but I know you will like it.~~

8. Slander
~~You utter f*ckwit, tinpot dicator, creep.~~

… and so forth and so on.

Great things to blog?

Progress. Things that are better. More loved, more appreciated. Times that have been seen, pictures in the mind, realised. Echoes. Places that were, places that are. People, real and imagined. Secrets, secret places. Change, more change, and those things that remain the same…

In a tutorial, once, a long time ago, I said that a photograph gives permission to stare. That the best photographs give us all permission to stare. And to be stared back at, scrutinised in turn. But maybe that’s just my biography.

Similar Posts:

How to Kill a Website Part 1

TPP — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:32:00 +0000

Answer? With neglect.

Your really simply syndicated readers don’t look, because they have nothing new to see, so the traffic drops and Google and all the other search spiders and robots stop crawling and soon the search engines leave your results way down at page two or three, or ten. And then the people who drop in from memory or their bookmarks change their browser or their system, and perhaps only your mother has a look from time to time to see if you’re still alive and kicking.

Deliberate, cruel neglect – at some point people will start wondering whether or not the only place to find you is the wayback machine.Similar Posts:

WordPress to Drupal?

TPP — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:32:39 +0000

Until recently, I adored WordPress. I’ve been teaching groups of artists and photographers to make websites and blogs using the free and easy WordPress.com package, which are so much the best offering out there to get going quickly. Magically easy, most of the templates are rather beautiful, and there’s enough customisation to make every site look different.

Then the first WordCamp UK came along, and in with the planning came enough cartoony controlling behaviours to begin a slow turnaround. Where were we women? Other halves, someone to do today’s equivalent of making the tea. As experts in our own fields, as co-workers in the big open source adventure? No. Ideas and suggestions were ignored, forum posts were skipped, and then fell under a welter of geek-talk and micro-chat. In the end, it proved impossible to go to the actual event, and probably that was a good thing, on balance.

But apart from a newly burgeoning UK community that seems to want autocratic geek hierachies, obsess about ways to increase traffic and the dreaded and ghastly monetisation, is WordPress itself broken?

In a matter of weeks since a major overhaul resulting in 2.5, version 2.6 has come out, and it seems that 2.5 is no longer being supported. Version 2.5 is okay, it mostly works, but the back end isn’t better organised or clearer than 2.3, and the image uploader is much worse. It hardly ever uploads a photo to a post first time, and often usually the code has to be typed in by hand. The much touted Gallery function, which would be marvellous on this site, doesn’t work properly either, looks ugly when it’s typed in, and the default links are all wrong, again with no way to change them except by typing.

The one function that is better in 2.5 over 2.3 is the ability to upload more than one image at a time. Is there anything else that’s better, really? If you can think of anything the Romans did for us WordPress does better in 2.5 or in 2.6, than in 2.3, please post it in the comments here. I’d love to know.

It takes some time to upgrade: all the plugins need switching off, backups need making and then it all needs putting back together afterwards. And there is always a plugin or an add-on that doesn’t work afterwards, since WordPress isn’t giving its developer community enough time to catch up. I have two blogs or three still on 2.3 which unfortunately have been dropped because there just isn’t time to upgrade them all.

And people are complaining about the feeds sometimes not working, and the templates are just well, not being produced for 2.5 or 2.6. A clean 3 column with plenty of width in the main area is getting hard to find unless CSS faffing is in order, and that’s hardly the point of using a no-coding system.

But why Drupal?

Three years ago (a long time in blogland) me and one Mr Lunatic Fringe aka Phil Ackley from Anchorage, had a blog called Things That Moved. It documented visually and in writing, a host of broken down farm machinery, planes, and dead motor cars, interspersed with the occasional corpse. Beautiful rusting heaps and shiny disintegrating chrome, with smatterings of gore. Things That Moved was built on Drupal.

A long time ago WordPress was simpler, and Drupal was much more complicated. Daunting, even. Now, it just looks very beautiful so perhaps it’s time to give it another try.

And of course there’s Angie.Similar Posts:

Handy Zone Ruler and Another Rebuild

TPP — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:47:58 +0000

The idea is that if you can’t distinguish the black on the far left from its near neighbours, and ditto the white on the right, your monitor needs recalibrating or your print needs more or less contrast. On many newer LCD monitors, the two darkest blacks are difficult to distinguish. If that’s the same with your darkroom print, experiment with the filters. A higher number (4 or 5) will bring out the detail in the whites, a lower or zero grade will help with the blacks.

Click to embiggen a version that can be downloaded to print.

A rebuild of this site this morning and The Photography Pages was caught by a couple of dawn readers who reported rubble and debris. All should be okay now; please report anything that doesn’t work or looks weird. We have more hard coding here than normal, so there will be glitches. The new Contact Me form seems to be working okay now though! Do please go ahead and test.

New look for the site for my own photos only, the version people seem to be calling ‘portfolio’ or the ‘professional’ site. Not entirely happy with it yet, but the bones are definitely there.Similar Posts:

Why Does Your Website Come up Higher Than Mine in Google?

TPP — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:43:03 +0000

One of a series of AskMe questions this week, this one a lot simpler to answer than the dreaded “film or digital?” – one for another day! The question in full is:

“How come when I google my name the Northern Exposure site comes up before my co.uk one? I added a meta tag in my code with lots of words.”

A series of robots (and humans) do the somewhat hefty job of indexing the whole of the internet so that the search engines (Google, Yahoo, AOL etc) can find us on the world wide web. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the combination of methods used by content management and web authors to try and ensure that their site has the correct ranking. The higher the better, obviously.

The WWW is indexed using text – words alone. For photography websites, and especially for static brochure-type sites based mostly or wholly around photographs, SEO is difficult to manage because there is simply not enough data (words) for the robots to catch.

Things you can do to improve your site’s search ranking:

1. Name your photographs in several places. The file name SaltburnPier01 is far better than IMG00356, and do make use of captions, titles and alt=”" tags. The more words associated with your photographs the easier they are to find.

2. Write about the work. Descriptions, explanatory pieces of prose, critique or even appropriate poetry, anything (See 1). Doesn’t have to be on the same page, but the more text the better.

3. Link to lots of other sites. Traffic is vital for SEO. Visitors in and through your site will automatically add to your ranking. Success definitely breeds success. If you have no visitors, you’ll get no visitors.

4. Keep your links relevant. For photographers, that means linking to other photography sites, and not to a general mashup of your other interests, unless they’re part of your context or genre, or they’re one of your clients.

5. Put your domain name (URL) into your signature on all your emails, and attach to any posts you make in photography forums, and in comments on other blogs. In other words, promote your own site. All the time.

6. Use Web2 social media like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Deviant Art, Lomography, whatever is current, fashionable, and is where the people you want to see your work are hanging out. If you’re not active on these sites, take a couple of days to get around as many of them as you can and register with a name unique to you that will help you stand out or create the feel or buzz you’re seeking to create around your work If you can engage properly in the ‘community’ on any of these sites, do so. Creating a sense of community around one’s work has never been easier, but like most things of any value, takes time to cultivate.

7. Use metatags. They won’t help much on their own, but put them in anyway.

8. Use a proprietory Content Management System (CMS) which is well known as an instant provider of good SEO. Currently WordPress is streets ahead in this game. If you want to make your own static website using something like Dreamweaver, make sure you do all of the above and keep your content regularly updated and changing.

9. WordPress is great for photographers, but there are a whole host of other content management systems for photographs out there. Look also at Drupal, Expression Engine and Moveable Type, and album and gallery systems like JAlbum, Banana Album, Simple Viewer, PixelPost and so on. Specifically look for sites made with any of these and see how high they rank by Googling their keywords or titles.

10. If you can’t manage much or all of the above, or still feel you need a static word-free site just for just photographs, like an extended business card, then do supplement your website with a weblog. A how-to of blogging for photographers is overdue here, but is on its way in the next week or so. The most basic key to successful blogging is very simple though: do it and just keep on doing it.

As ever, anyone with additional hints or tips, please do follow up in the comments section.Similar Posts: