Brand New Blog – Ray Burn Photography

Hi, I’m Ray, a photographer based in Brighton, East Sussex. BurnImage is my brand new blog and photo gallery website for Ray Burn Photography.

For ages now I’ve had “make a photography website and blog” on my list of things to do. I’ve finally done it! It was actually quite complicated as I used WordPress for this blog and Adobe Portfolio for the image portfolio. Which, let’s face it, is the most important part of a photography site.

In order to do this I’ve put the Adobe Portfolio gallery on the root domain name and this blog on a subdomain, with menu links to seamlessly switch between the two. The idea being to try and create a single website experience as best I can, whilst technically its actually two websites.

Update: February 2020

I’ve changed direction and now the whole website is on the root domain, www.burnimage.co.uk, using only WordPress. I am no longer using a subdomain or Adobe Portfolio. It’s been quite a huge task to redesign everything, but should be simple to work with now it’s setup!

Why?

Upon reflection, if I want the best website I can make, then putting everything on a single WordPress website is the most elegant solution in the longer term.

In order to bring my galleries into WordPress I’ve opted to use FooGallery and Foobox Pro. After some research I decided these plugins (which complement each other) best meet my gallery requirements. I also feel they offer the best visitor experience, but that’s a subjective view.

I still think Adobe Portfolio is a great solution if you don’t need a blog and want a really easy way to make an image gallery website. So the following section of this post is still relevant to photographers pondering which direction to take:

Why use both WordPress and Adobe Portfolio?

If you want a blog then WordPress is the way to go, and with a suitable theme and gallery plugin I could (and have now) made the whole site in WordPress.

However, this method is more time consuming in the long run as you need to resize and optimise every image for the web, export them, then import them into your gallery plugin and organise them too.

However, with an Adobe CC subscription all this happens seamlessly from within Lightroom to Adobe Portfolio with a few mouse clicks. No image exporting or resizing needed.

In fact, you don’t even need to make jpegs of your processed raw files, Adobe’s secret sauce handles this like magic. The downside of Adobe Portfolio is that there is no blog or commenting functionality. Hence my decision to use both platforms.

So, why make a website in the first place?

Well, I love photography and equally I like to document my travels and experiences. If nothing else, it acts as a personal journal of my adventures…… even if nobody else is reading! But if you are reading this, that’s great too!

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