I’m starting to combine an art gallery website with a Blogger blog into a WordPress blog. Here are some of the project’s initial tasks:
- Determine what the best domain would be and create a new one or use the existing art gallery website name as the new combined art gallery/blog.
- Review and determine where we’re going to host the new blog.
- How are we going to get the six months worth of Blogger blog posts over to WordPress?
- What kind of WordPress theme should we use? The owner of the blog really doesn’t want to pay for a premium or custom theme just yet.
- What existing gallery software can we use? The owner of the blog doesn’t want the typical thumbnail images where you click on the thumbnails and a window opens with an enlarged view of the thumbnail and then you have to click the large view to close it. Rather, she wants one bigger image frame on a page with thumbnails that you load the image into as you click on its thumbnails. Most likely there will be categorized galleries – Abstracts, Landscapes, Figurative, etc.
- The main purpose of the art gallery will be to display the art which are 99% oil paintings. Each painting will be displayed in the larger view and provide the size and price.
- To purchase prints of the art there will be a link to a third-party art print website where you can purchase prints of the art.
- Determine menu structure – Home or Blog – Gallery – About – Contact and ?
- Determine what should the first page be – The blog or the gallery? We’re leaning towards the gallery since that is the focus of the blog. WordPress has as nice little feature in the “Options – Reading” section that allows you to pick what the first page is that displays when people browse to your blog.
- How will we bring the existing Feedburner subscribers over to the new blog without losing the subscribers?
- Determine which WordPress plugins to use right off the bat.
- What and how much monetization will we be doing on the blog now and in the future?
- How do all the various formatting of text look in the theme – ordered lists, unordered lists, quotes, comments, how wide is the theme for displaying images?
Well, I think that’s it for now. Quite a bit to do over a weekend but it will be good to start and get some answers and direction to this project. Some of the above tasks and questions will be easy and quicker than others to get going on and implement.
I’m sure I’ll be hunting around the net looking for different galleries that will display images in WordPress. I’ll be looking at different WordPress themes as well. The artist would like specific colors for the blog so I don’t know about finding an existing theme that will work so we’ll see. There might be some WordPress theme customization in my near future. 🙂
How did this project come along? I’m interested in something like this.
Sherwin
Sherwin Paraynos last blog post..SLOW DOWN & SMELL THE FLOWERS
@Sherwin – Sorry for the late reply. It went well. It took all weekend but I had a lot of notes put together of what I was going to do. Some redirection issues, didn’t lose too many, if any, subscribers, had to fix about 92 links which I did over the course of 3 months.
Since the artist was in it for the long haul she was okay with that. I ended up using the thesis theme and the free gallery wordpress plugin nextgen – http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/. I’m still looking for something better and with the jQuery stuff that guys are using and proucing some incredible image gallery software.
Besides all that I created a long, long list of what I did and was going to do. I wanted to create a blog post series out that but haven’t gotten around to it.
Hi,
I am looking for some help to deploy an online art gallery to showcase my mother’s paintings. I would like an interface similar to what you had mentioned. The visitors must be able to view the images category wise and clicking on them the same page must display the details. They must be able to contact the artist as well for further details to place order. how can i get started?
@Anirudh Goel: Check out a search on twitter for jQuery galleries or something similar. There are now some incredible jQuery galleries out there – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=jquery+gallery
Also, I ended up using the freely available nextgen gallery. It’s pretty flexible – http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/
However, I still look for other galleries as well. I like some of the newer jQuery stuff I’m finding on the net.
Any updates on new galleries that you found interesting? One of the projects on my to-do list is making my artwork available online, preferably using a WordPress blog, but I haven’t really seen any themes I like.