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#1 2018-01-06 08:48:11
Backlight + WordPress Theme + Client Response Gallery
I'm sharing the site not for bragging (well, not all that much really). I'm sharing this as an example of what you can build with Backlight and how to integrate it with WordPress. I also use the Client Response Gallery quite a lot! (more on that at the end).
I'll answer any questions and help if you find something in my site that inspires you. There's a lot of small details (I'm that kind of guy) and most will probably go unnoticed.
My main focus was to get the site optimized for mobile. 2/3rds of my visitors are on phones. That's why I don't have huge full screen images, slide shows, and such.
Also the site is highly optimized for speed. All pages and images should render very quickly.
I'm about 95% done, and the last 5% is always the hardest and takes the longest to complete. I haven't made any big changes now in over a month, so I'm willing to share the site at this point.
The site is mainly a WordPress site. All except the photos, which are controlled by Backlight+Lightroom. The WordPress theme was designed with Backlight. The two should be seamless. There's only a small amount of custom CSS for the final fit and polish.
The site has well over 1,000 images, and I keep adding more each month. I'm so far behind in editing shoots (a few years worth). The main reason I spent all the time to get this site up and designed the way it is is so I can focus on getting more photos published. Now that the site is up and running well, I can very easily publish. Whew!
A major step in getting my new site up involved finding a new hosting service. Long story short, I'm now on Site Ground and have been very impressed with them. I highly recommend them with no hesitation.
Other features under the hood is a lot of security. WordPress sites get hacked all the time. In the past couple months I've fended off dozens of attack bots.
There's a lot of SEO details that are not going to be seen by a visitor, but search engines do notice them. My site gets more than the average traffic. I've built a few sites and most WordPress themes are not well designed for SEO. Even those expensive themes have problems. I've done about as much with SEO at this point. I wish I could fix a few more things but I'm up against limitations in Backlight.
I always let my models choose their favorite images, and Client Response Gallery has been invaluable.
I don't care for all the nerdy stuff about camera data. Actually, I never want to share that! I reduced the UI to get it as minimal as possible. It's much easier for the models to quickly and easily send me their favorites and with the rare comment.
I setup an example just so you can see what I've done with Client Response Gallery. I'm not linking to it here, to prevent search bots from finding and recording this location.
my-domain slash proofs slash test
PS - if you look at a couple of the non-photography pages you might be surprised to learn about me. You've heard of at least one thing I've done and have heard it a few thousand times.
Last edited by JimR (2018-01-06 12:39:31)
--Jim
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#2 2018-01-07 16:20:56
Re: Backlight + WordPress Theme + Client Response Gallery
Nice, Jim! Glad to hear you're finally (nearly) complete, and ready to share.
We'll hopefully be able to expand Backlight's SEO capabilities as we grow it out, and if you have any suggestions in particular how the Wordpress theme might be improved in that regard, let me know. I'm constantly tweaking the line between keeping things vanilla enough to play nicely with plugins, and trying to see what features I can pack in without breaking that compatibility.
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