Perhaps you heard that WordPress drives almost 25% of all websites. This fact makes it possible to create a big ecosystem of developers and a huge number of themes and plugins for photographers. So, creating a platform to sell your photos on WP is not a bad choice. Let’s dive into all nitty-gritty.
Use cases: photo sites on WordPress
The first point: WooCommerce is a platform for e-commerce build on WordPress (is like an extension).
Before we start to create a photo site, below we’ve provided a couple of beautiful examples for the inspiration.
Daniel Burgas
Daniel Burgas
Daniel’s Burgas site comes with a lot of useful and interesting features like advanced search, photo collections, topic clouds, and much more interesting.
Hello Little Studios
Hello Little Studio
Hello Little Studios implements a beautiful slider on the top of the site and create a gallery just under it. They shift the focus from the text, minimizing it, to photos.
Max Sukhomlin
Max Sukhomlin
Max Sukhomlin creates a site using only two colors: black and white. And on the top of the home page put a full-sized image, that immediately grabs users’ attention.
First steps
If you are a newcomer to WordPress, so read this section, and if you’ve already had a site, feel free to skip it. Here we are going to tell about the basics.
First of all, you need to get web hosting. There are a lot of different cloud platforms, where you can do it:
Secondly, choose and register a domain name. A vast majority of hosting providers offer domain registration as part of the sign-up process. In other cases, you can find and buy it on the following platforms:
The third thing is installing WordPress. There is a detailed tutorial of how to do it. After that, start to design your site’s from choosing a theme for photographers. We’ve already filtered them for you.
And the last, install WooCommerce plugin and WooBeWoo Product Table.
How to upload the photos
To download photos to the site navigate to WooCommerce -> Products -> Add New.
Add a new product
One tip: you can use bulk import to save your time. For this, go to WooCommerce -> Products -> All Products. It allows you to import from the CSV file.
Import feature
How to create downloadable products
In WooCommerce you can create different types of products. And now we want to follow this logic:
- Users choose the photos
- Purchase them
- You give access to a special link where they can download these photos.
For this, on the Product’s page scroll to the Product data block and check Downloadable option.
Product data block
Then, fill these fields:
- Price
- File Name and File URL
- Download limit
- Download expiry.
How to create a Product table
And now we are going to create a photo catalog, where users will be able to buy the photos. Once you’ve installed and activated a WooBeWoo Product table, you may notice a new item in your left menu bar – Woo Product Table by WooBeWoo. Click on it and create a new table.
In a Content tab Add New Products and Buy property.
Content tab
Then go to Settings -> Features and enable all the options like add to cart, sorting, pagination, etc.
Settings tab
Here is the result!
