Do you have a Lightbox plugin?

Do you have Photo Shop 7 or above?

Do you have an HTML editing program with Advanced Search & Replace?

Do you have FTP software and know how to use it?

If you answered Yes to all of the above, read on…

• First, place all of your photos in a folder
• Open Photo Shop
• Click File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery
• In Styles, choose a simple HTML gallery that displays thumbnails in a table
• In Source Images choose Folder and then Browse to the folder that contains your source images and also to one where you want the output to go
• In Options > General you can choose to include image dimensions in the code
• In Options > Large Images, choose to Resize the images and constrain the height to somewhere around 450 or whatever works for you
• In Options > Thumbnails, choose a size that will allow them to fit neatly across
• Set the number of Rows to the number of gallery pages you want to make from your images
• Set the number of Columns to the maximum number of images per page (or the total number of images if you want them all on one page)
• Click OK and wait for Photo Shop to launch the finished output in your web browser
• Now open your HTML editor
• Open the index.html file that was created by Photo Shop
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, remove all of the <td> and </td> tags and the white space in between
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, add any style attributes you want to the <img src tags (e.g. replace <img src with <img style=”margin: 4px;” src)
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, change all of the links that end in .html to .jpg
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, change all of the href and image paths to your intended WordPress paths (usually /wp-content/uploads/whatever…). Make sure the image and href paths do not point to the same folder, because your thumbnails and large images will have the same filenames
• Upload all of the images from the Photo Shop output /images folder to the href path you just specified
• Upload all of the thumbnails from the Photo Shop output /thumbnails folder to the img src path you just specified
• Now, with the WordPress editor in HTML mode, copy the code between <tr> and </tr> tags from the Photo Shop output index.html page that you have altered into a WordPress page or post

Voila! You now have a photo gallery and you didn’t manually resize any photos or write any code!

Note that the reason for not using tables is that you may change themes one day and the table layout that was output by Photo Shop may no longer be convenient for you.

Examples:

Single Page

Multi-Page

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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My answer to the second question is always “It can be. It can be anything you want it to be.”

The answer to the first question is much more complex. There are many reasons to blog…

• RSS makes it easier to get your site noticed
• You may gain the respect of your audience as you demonstrate your skills at self-publishing. You may even come to be considered an aficionado on a given subject or a reliable source of information or inspiration. Bolster your credibility.
• It’s a feature-rich web site that is very fast and easy to set up & maintain
• Plugins and Themes allow you to easily expand/upgrade functionality & appearance

I think there are two ways to approach setting up a blog. You have to decide whether you want your blog to be post-driven or page-driven. Most blogs are post-driven, meaning that the home page contains the most recent posts. However, a blog can be page-driven, meaning that the home page is one of your blog pages, and users have to click a link in the  pages menu to see the most recent posts. Pages can have “parent pages” and thereby become nested in the page menu. In this  way the posts aspect of the blog becomes played down a bit and the user experience is more like that of a traditional static web site. In fact, you don’t have to have a default posts page at all. However, in every scenario the admin has a powerful set of tools with which to update and maintain the site.

Perhaps the best way to get a sense of the things you can do with a blog is to peruse the WordPress Plugins Directory. It contains over 4,000 plugins at the time of this writing. Plugins can allow your blog to become an ecommerce site, an appointment scheduler, a place to announce events, an image gallery, a music library, an educational resource, etc. and the best part is that you can maintain it yourself with little or no intervention from a webmaster.

So, if you are thinking about putting up a web site and you are concerned about things like easy maintenance, low setup and maintenance costs, and easy customizability, you may want to consider putting up a blog rather than a traditional web site.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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