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.

One of the easiest ways to get started with Wordpress is to cutomize a pre-made theme or template. I pointed Tricia to ThemeForest, which I’ve used before, because the themes there are inexpensive and high quality. She chose one called PhotographerDream.

It features a nifty rollover effect on the home page, where it automatically displays the most recent images added to the portfolio. The top navigation displays a lits of categories, as well as pages and a link to Tricia’s blog.

The theme as purchased was purple and pink, but Tricia preferred a more understated black and grey scheme. I showed where to edit the stylesheet to make the changes, but being tech-savvy, she did all the customization herself.

The whole thing was completed in a weekend.

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.

Here’s an example:

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.

PictureSurf is really easy to use. Just upload your photos, give them captions if you like and make some choices about size, colors, etc. The app takes care of all the geeky bits. If you’re using the Wordpress plugin, you do all this in your post admin. If using the Web site, the app gives you a code you can copy and paste into whatever page you’re working on.

One note: To upload more than one photo at a time, you’ll need Flash Player 10. Otherwise, you’ll have to use a browser-based uploader that allows only one photo at a time. And if you try to use the Flash uploader with an older version of Flash player, it doesn’t work.