My Favourite Wordpress Photo Gallery Plugin Just Added an Awesome New Feature

If you’re a photographer with a Wordpress website then you need to have a great gallery plugin to give you ultimate control on how you display your images. I use and recommend Envira Gallery because it allows me to make cool sections like this automatically updating Instagram gallery, or even to sync photos to my website from within Lightroom. Recently Envira added another cool feature called Lazy Loading. When a page on your website is opened in someone’s browser, normally the browser loads all the content from the page, even if you haven’t scrolled down to all of it just yet. Lazy …

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How to Add an Instagram Gallery to Your Website

Instagram is one of my favourite ways to share my work, and on my website I have a page where you can view my latest Instagram posts. A few people have asked me how I created this Instagram gallery, so I wanted to address it here in the Readers Questions section of the blog. Firstly, this site runs on WordPress so for this particular solution, I’m afraid you’re out of luck if your site doesn’t use the same platform. One of the most powerful things about using WordPress is that there are tens of thousands of plugins available for it, …

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Best Divi Site Designs Feature on Winning WP

Not too long ago, my website was featured by the makers of my favourite WordPress themes, Elegant Themes, as one of the top 25 sites using the Divi framework.  For those that don’t know, WordPress is a powerful website platform that’s free to use, but it requires a “Theme” to be used to take care of the look of the site.  That’s why not all WordPress sites look the same.  I use a theme from Elegant Themes called Extra, and it’s built on their incredible Divi framework that allows massive amounts of customizations to be carried out by regular Joes like …

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Best Photography Blogs Feature

I was thrilled to learn recently about my inclusion in First Site Guide’s list of best photography blogs, even better, they created this awesome illustration of me as well! First Site Guide is a website about creating your first blog, and it seems to be an excellent resource on that subject.  As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts this month, my website is a hugely important part of my business and I’ve lost count of the number of emails and other messages I get which start with “I was just browsing your website and…”. A well thought out and well …

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Watch My Interview on the Divi Nation WordPress Podcast

My website has always played a vital role in my business, and over the years it has developed into something I’m very proud of. The site is built on the WordPress platform, and I use a theme from Elegant Themes, called Extra. I also use a theme called Divi from Elegant Themes over on Shutter Muse. Both of these themes are built around ET’s Divi Builder framework which comes with the Divi and Extra themes, or can be added to any other theme using a plugin. I’m definitely NOT a web designer, but the Divi Builder allows me to create …

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My Website Featured Again In “Best Of” List

Once again, my website has been featured in a “best of” list, this time by Wordpress theme makers, Elegant Themes.  Elegant Themes make two WordPress themes, Divi and Extra, that use a framework called the Divi Builder.  It allows you to do some really awesome designs without needing to be a web designer and it’s also available as a plugin so that it can be used with an existing theme. ET recently published a list of 25 Stunning Divi Sites to Feed Your Inspiration, and I’m proud to say that this site was featured on their list. I take my …

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Elegant Themes WordPress Feature

I take my website very seriously because it has been the source of so many of the great things that have happened to me throughout my career.  This website is built on a platform called Divi, by Elegant Themes.  It’s a theme that has an incredible amount of customization options so no two Divi sites have to look the same. A while back, Elegant Themes contacted me and asked me if they could do a feature about me and my site on their blog.  I think at the time, I actually forgot to post this on my own blog, so …

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WordPress For Video Professionals

I’ve just published my monthly article on ProVideo Coalition and this time it’s an in-depth look at using WordPress to create a portfolio website. In this mammoth article I cover the following: –>> Introduction – Why WordPress? –>> How to start a WordPress website in 5 minutes –>> 11 top WordPress themes for video professionals –>>  Best WordPress video gallery plugins If you create a lot of video content and your website is a bit long in the tooth, or worse, you don’t even have a website, check it out HERE!  

Elegant Themes – Divi 2.0 – WordPress Theme Follow Up

divi-featured

UPDATED: May 4th 2016 – Discussion on why I switched to Extra from the Divi theme.

UPDATED: March 22nd 2016 – Plugin list updated to reflect current set of plugins used on this site.

Divi Discounts

 

Important Message – Please Read!

Hello Elegant Themes Blog Readers

Many of you reading this will be coming to it from my guest post over on the Elegant Themes blog where I talked about why I chose to use the Divi theme to build my website.  Well, eagle-eyed people might spot immediately that I am no longer using Divi, and in fact, Im now using Elegant Themes’ other Divi-based theme called EXTRA.  Here’s why…

Divi was, actually still is, revolutionary for people like me.  Someone who cases A LOT about the visuals of their site, but doesn’t have the developer skills to achieve the desired results on their own.  I had a blast building my site in Divi, but then Elegant Themes released a new theme called Extra.  Extra is built around the Divi core, but it caters a bit better for people that run a blog.  It includes all the features of the Divi builder (and they get updates at the same time!), but it also includes a ton of additional features that allow me to design the archive pages of my blog (which you can read more about on the Extra page).  I have close to 1000 blog posts on my site, so this was a big draw for me.

Since Extra includes Divi Builder within it, all my pages still look exactly the same when I switched to Extra from Divi.  Many people won’t have noticed the swap at all, and from my end it was totally seamless.  All the special designs I created for my pages on the home page, about page and contact page just worked as they did before, and looked identical!

The biggest difference is the blog post design (you’re looking at one, so how do you like it?), and the change in the menu design at the top of the posts and pages.  Normally switching themes would constitute vast visual changes, but since Divi and Extra are built around the same core there’s not a whole lot that’s different.

Divi Vs. Extra

So, does this mean I now recommend you should use Extra? Not necessarily…

As a creative professional, I’m a bit different to many others in the same position because my blog is also part of my business model so I use it a lot and it has a ton of archive content on it.  If you plan on blogging a lot, at a minimum I would say 1-2 times per week for years, then I would say Extra has some very beneficial features that will help you create a great experience for your readers. But you really have to be certain that you’re going to keep up the blogging, and not just “give it a try”, otherwise these benefits will be lost on you.

If you just want a portfolio site that’s primarily going to be composed of “Pages” rather than “Posts”, then Divi will still be the go-to choice. As I proved already, if you decide to make the switch later, it’s no trouble at all! All of your beautiful Divi Builder page designs will work in Extra right off the bat.  Divi is still a great theme for a blogger as well and I’ve used it very effectively for three years to make a ton of additional money for my business.  That means that if you don’t prefer to the look of the Extra blog posts over the Divi ones, it’s not a huge deal, you can still happily use the regular Divi theme.

I’m happy to answer questions on this topic in the comments!

 

 

Divi Discounts

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