Whats features are in the ultimate photography website?

In case you haven’t noticed I’m always trying out new websites over at TJP, different styles and features, some of which I customise because the website just didn’t have what I was looking for or I out grew it. The question about the ultimate list of features has been one that I have started asking myself over the past few weeks, and I thought it would be interesting to see what you guys thought.

At the moment I use WordPress for all of my websites. It works well but I often wonder is it the right solution. Would photographers be better off with a customised website that had only the features needed, one that hadn’t been skewed and bent to meet the requirements. I know WordPress is highly customisable and with the amount of plugins and themes available through the community can seem like it’s the holy grail, but perhaps there is just too much choice. Is self hosting the answer or is a hosted service easier?

When it comes to design and style is a blog based site the way to go or the more traditional portfolio? When it comes to customisation do we really need to be able to easily change every single colour and image or is keeping things simple and clean the way to go? Again it comes down to, is there just too many choices and options available?

Lastly, when we finally get around to posting our images, should we be encouraged to just post our best photos in a portfolio and leave other images for blog posts? There are so many sites that offer portfolios + galleries + blog posts. Photo editing, and I’m talking about the process of choosing only your best photos to display and put in your portfolio, it’s a hard enough task without being given the option to share absolutely everything.

I’m very interested to know what your thoughts are and if you have any other ideas/features that you think are important, leave them in the comments below.

About the Author: Tristan

I'm a Husband, blogger, and a photographer. I love what I do, snowboarding, chocolate and coffee. You can find me here Tristan Jud Photography · TMJDaily · Facebook · Twitter · Flickr · 500px · Google+ · YouTube · Vimeo · Pinterest

Andrew Keane

I started with a plaint .html/CSS site I wrote myself after a crash self taught course in the language, which I then hosted on a server. I found updating it very time consuming, and hard to do, if not on my own PC and have since switched to Wordpress. Whislt maybe not quite as powerful, I have found its ease of use, ability to update via login and all the add-ons which are freely available really useful.