My friend Tricia is a great photographer and really sweet girl, so of course when she asked me to help her re-launch her portfolio site I said yes. Previously, her site had been a standard Flash-based site – the kind used by many photographers – and she wanted something different and easy to update.
She’s already blogging on Wordpress.com, so I suggested she use a self-hosted Wordpress installation as her portfolio site. It will be easy for her to update, she can add functionality as her site grows and it’s much, much more search-engine friendly than her old Flash site. Read more
I recently finished working with a client on a project that had a lot of requirements. She wanted to be able to share videos online, with minimal fuss and no technical skill, and wanted the videos to be accessible only to those she wanted to see them. It was a pretty obvious choice to use WordPress, because of its ease of use. Here’s a list of the other applications and plugins I used to set up their site.
Convert videos to FLV SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.
Upload the videos to the server FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.
Display the videos on WordPress Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.
Keeping it private WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.
I’m always looking for a way to display photos that doesn’t require coding or installing scripts, something that anybody can use. I think PictureSurf could be a good option.
The free photo gallery maker can be used as an online tool, or installed as a plugin on Wordpress. The Web site also promises versions for Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, Blogger and others are coming soon. Because this blog uses WordPress, I installed the plugin.
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