Introduction
This series of tutorials was prepared for a class at Maryland Institute College of the Arts to create a website for students’ work. I will also be presenting website workshops at Rhode Island School of Design Scultpure Department and Bard. Wordpress with the WPFolio template, created by Eyebeam, offers an inexpensive, extensible way to make an artist portfolio website with little technical know-how. These tutorials include step by step instructions on setting up WPFolio from buying a domain name to adding “gallery” pages to a simple well-designed website. It will be helpful for all artists creating their own websites.
- Intro and Examples
- Purchasing a domain name and hosting from GoDaddy
- Installing Wordpress on GoDaddy
- Using FTP in Dreamweaver to upload WPFolio
- Configuring Wordpress, WPFolio and required plugins
- Creating the Navigation Menu by adding Categories
- Creating Galleries of Images
- Adding a Bio, Contact & Home Page
- Customizing the Menu Order
- Other Online Artist Portfolios
Preparing Images
Before you upload images to your site they need to be sized, color-corrected and exported as jpegs. Color correct you image for the screen. In order to fit on most screens using "lightbox" images should have a maximum width of 900px and a maximum height of 600px. Images should be 72dpi and exported as a medium high quality jpeg. Don’t export them at 99% quality. The final image will be between 50KB and 100KB. Wordpress with Gallery-Plus will create thumbnails for you.
Both Photoshop and Fireworks offer batch processing, which can automate some of this tedious work.
I recommend that you organize your image files in folders as you want them to appear online so it will be easy to access them as you upload them.
NOTE: You will have better luck if your file names, include the proper extension, jpg, etc and have no white space or unusual characters, e.g. $#^,"" . It is best if the names include only letters, numbers, underscore and dashes.
Adding Images to a Post and Creating a "Gallery"
Click on "Posts" in the left hand menu of Wordpress.
Click "New Post"
Make sure you choose the category for the post, in the right hand sidebar.
Add a title for the the group of images being uploaded, e.g. "Recent Sculpture",
"River Series", etc.
Click the small image icon above the "post" text box, shown below:
An overlay dialog box appears. Click Select Files
Navigate to the images you wish to upload and select them.
You can select multiple files.
Watch the images as they upload. It will be quick if you have broadband.
Click "Save All Changes" and the screen will refresh in the Gallery tab.
NOTE: I have noticed a glitch. If you are uploading large files or many files at the same time, the gallery tab does not appear. Try uploading one image first. Then repeat the process selecting multiple files from your computer. This method seems to force the software to create a gallery.
Leave the other gallery options, as is.
You may want to change the number of Gallery Columns depending on the layout of your page.
You will return to this screen later to add more information like title, media, size to your images.
Click "Insert Gallery".
After returning to the post page Click "Publish" on the right side of the page.
Click "View Post" to check the page.
You should see a page with several rows of thumbnails cropped to 150 x 150 pixels.
Click the thumbnails and see the lightbox in action.
Adding the title, media, date and size of each artwork
In the admin sectio of Wordpress return to the post you just created.
In the text box, click the yellow gallery icon and then click the image icon to edit the gallery (see below).
In the overlay dialog box click "show" next to an image.
Add title, media, size and date to "Title". (As you get to know Wordpress, you may want to use the other options. For now, leave them as is.)
Repeat this process with all your images.
Once you have finished click "Save All Changes", at the bottom of the list of images.
Don’t forget to do this or your titles will be lost and you will have to enter them again.
Exit the dialog box and click "Update Post".
Check your page by clicking "View Post". The title, etc. only appears in the "lightbox", not below the thumbnails.
Repeat to create more "galleries".
Hi Daniel. I really appreciate your tutorials. I have a simple question..I think. I just started using wordpress and wpfolio and I would like to set my site up with my blog as my homepage and then just a few other categories like portolio, photography and about. The issue I’m having is that I keep creating posts with gallery images and it keeps posting these things on my homepage blog. I don’t want them displayed there. I only want my ‘blog’ posts to come in as posts. I want everything else to be static underneath my other categories. Is there a way to do this? Thank you
Josh,
Thanks. I am glad the tutorial is helpful.
This requires a plugin called FrontPage Manager (It should be easy but to do it without a plugin, but it requires some programming and the creation of a new file for the WPFolio theme. So, let’s skip ahead and use the plugin).
With recent versions of Wordpress you can find and install plugins from the “Dashboard”. Go to Plugins->Add New and enter “Frontpage Manager” in the search box. In the list of plugins then shown, “Frontpage Manager” is about 5th in the list. Click “install” to the right of the plugin description and follow the screen instructions until the plugin is installed and activated. (Don’t forget to activate it).
Then go to Settings->Frontpage Manager, choose the category and options you wish and click “Update Options”.
Make sure that in Setting->Reading that you have chosen “Your Latest Posts” for “Front Page Displays”.
Check your front page. As with all things “computer” it may take a few tries to get exactly what you want.
Useful Links
Frontpage Manager on Wordpress
Plugin Homepage