An entrepreneur needed to develop a community website for people to share their life experiences through photography. Here’s a list of her website objectives:
- A home page with rotating film strip images, each linking to the related gallery
- Allow photographers limited access to upload photos and create posts
- A way for site visitors to quickly navigate to all the galleries by city and show date
- Allow site visitors to post comments with an approval process
The solution
The home page rotating film strip was created with an image-rotator plugin that has the ability to create an image area of any specific height and width. Additionally, each image can independently link to any URL.
A plugin was used that allows pre-approved photographers to upload their own photos to a new gallery. Specific written instructions were provided to dozens of photographers so they would be able to create their own post gallery. For this website, the site administrator’s approval is required before the photographer’s post goes live.
The gallery plugin lets the website administrator quickly choose from dozens of global visual options including the size of each gallery thumbnail, the number of rows and columns and more. Additionally, custom watermarks can be placed on selected photos.
Site visitors are able to quickly navigate to specific shows they want to view through the menu bar. Once the visitor clicks on a specific show, they are taken to a summary page of all the photographers that participated in that show. Each summary listing then links to the post page of that photographer which includes the text, the gallery and a link to a profile of the photographer.
The optional ‘leave a comment’ section is a standard feature in WordPress. For this website, the comment section was set up so the site administrator approves only the first comment from a visitor. However, this can also be set up so there is no approval or so approval is required for every comment. WordPress even has the ability to blacklist users by email and IP address.
Testimonial
Tom created a beautiful website for me 2 years ago. This year, I started a community project where 4 participants took 10 photos a day for a month. After the first exhibition the audience attending the show wanted to view the photos online. That’s when I turned to Tom for help. Knowing how fabulous he was the first time around, I knew creating a blog with Tom would be fun and better than I had envisioned.
Tom is an expert in Wordpress and immediately assured me that a blog would be simple and he would walk me through the process step by step. Each phase of development was accompanied by a detailed outline of the process. He presented the directions in such an easy to understand way and quickly my blog was developed. Tom made what I thought would be a huge undertaking seem easy to manage and exciting.
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When I had a question, Tom responded immediately with a not just one solution but a few allowing my personal expression to show. The beauty of Wordpress is that the layout and design can be directed by the developer thereby allowing your own vision to show through. I will turn to Tom for future projects knowing that he will make it happen quickly and efficiently. Thank you, Tom! Joyce M.
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