They are finally here. We have been so busy lately, but it is time to announce that the WordPress Themes for photographers are ready for purchase and installation.

We are really pretty proud of these WP Themes. They are built with the incredible power of WordPress, and are widget and portfolio ready. The price is a one time purchase and includes any and all updates to the theme you purchase.

What makes them different from a regular WordPress theme? Well, for starters the home page is fixed. Most contain a mini gallery entitled “New Work” and all can be used with the incredible SlideShowPro.net Gallery Tool (see their website for licensing and specifics on the different products they offer. Need help deciding? Call us.) SlideShowPro allows you to easily manage galleries, add images, create new categories, add music, video and more. It is the most robust gallery tool I am aware of. They have a Lightroom module that really rocks if you are currently using Lightroom.

We know that a lot of photographers don’t want to write a lot, so we added the post feature to be more of a “Project” post. As you decide to add to your projects you can open the page in WP and edit it, add images, or simply add a new project page. You can edit any page on your site at any time you want. You can even reorder the pages, create new pages, and add ‘sub-pages’ to your pages. Easy, quick and fun.

We recommend the following widgets for you as well: GEN Gallery, Analytics, SEO Tools, Visual Editor and Lightbox. In addition, we will offer some great little movies on getting your site up and working for you.

There are so many reasons to go with Lighting Essentials WordPress sites for photographers: Search Engine Friendly pages, easy to manage, clean design, large images, fast set-up, no webmaster, tracking… the list goes on and on.

BTW… here are some previous Interviews posts I think you will enjoy. Some on the magazine site.
Claire Curran Corbett
Michael Maersch
Joshua Targownik
Jimi Giannatti
Kieth Taylor
Laurie Meehan-Elmer
Jay B. Sauceda
Eduardo Frances

And if you are looking for a workshop, check out Learn to Light for an updated calendar of workshops all over America.

Let’s take a look at these new WordPress themes for photographers.

The “Anna Maria” site is our newest site. Clean and Simple, the site allows for a home page show of new work, projects to show more work, a full gallery presentation for portfolio, simple clean pages, optional footer area and more. Building an Anna Maria site would be nearly as much fun as when we visit the lovely Isle near Tampa, FL for which it is named.

Anna Maria features:

• 6 large images on home page with thumbnails. “New Work”
• Three “Projects or Posts” on front page.
• Widget enabled.
• No Sidebar on interior pages
• Optional Footer area for widgets
• Search Engine friendly pages

Antique White has a nice feel to it. Large images with small thumbs for the New Work gallery on the home page. A footer area for widgets, and three projects showing to bring visitors into the site. Antique white can easily be customized by changing a little CSS here and there and adding a new background. Antique White has been one of our favorites.

Our Antique White theme features:

• 10 large images on home page with thumbnails. “New Work”
• Three “Projects or Posts” on front page.
• Widget enabled.
• Sidebar on interior pages
• Footer area for widgets
• Search Engine friendly pages

The Black Portrait features a unique styling, and only one interchangeable image on the home page. Managed by the photographer, the home page is very simple and clean without footers. Pages do not have sidebars, but feature large image areas and text as well.

Black Portrait features:

• 5 large images on home page with thumbnails. “New Work”
• Three “Projects or Posts” on front page.
• Widget enabled.
• Sidebar on interior pages
• Footer area for widgets
• Search Engine friendly pages

The New Business theme offers thumbnail New Work gallery, footers and all the SEO goodness of WordPress. This theme also has no sidebars in the interior pages. Easy to change background colors, fonts styling and color and more, this theme is seemingly very popular.

New Business features:

• 10 large images on home page with thumbnails. “New Work”
• Three “Projects or Posts” on front page.
• Widget enabled.
• Sidebar on interior pages
• Footer area for widgets
• Search Engine friendly pages

We call this one “Template 3″ and we have no real reason for that. With a large image show on the home page to a full, built-in blog this site can really grow with a photographers career. Easily change the background and change the CSS for different colored text and headlines. From wild to sublime, Template 3 is ready for your best shots.

Template 3 features:

• 8 large images on home page with thumbnails. “New Work”
• Three “Projects or Posts” on front page.
• Widget enabled.
• No Sidebar on interior pages
• Search Engine friendly pages
• Built-in Blog

Themes are only $99. All are modern WP and are ready for the Plugins of your choice. From SEO to analytics to serving ads, there are hundreds of incredible Plugins to make your site do what you want it to do and you don’t need to know code to do it.

All of our themes ship with a beautiful web gallery built in. You can use it for a professional presentation or you can implement other gallery styles. We love the presentation that SlideshowPro.net has and we recommend it for photographers who have a lot of images in many categories.

Additional licenses for the SlideShowPro.net gallery tools are available at their site. Licenses at SlideshowPro.net start at $39 and are per domain.

If you would like us to add any of SlideShowPro’s tools from SlideshowPro for Flash with Director, or Slideshowpro for Lightroom, simply purchase your license and let us know. We will install it for you. Whether you use their Lightroom or Director product, it will make an outstanding presentation in your site. If you are not sure what you need, contact them or us and we can help.

Your website can show videos, play MP3′s, link Podcasts and more. With WordPress, the ability to grow your site is simply incredible. We feel that this may be the future for website construction for those who want to maximize the searchability and networking that the interactive web offers.

All sites have the SEO tool set installed so creating SE friendly pages, with easy indexing by Google and others are a no-brainer. Visual editors makes it easy to manage, and the overall power of WordPress is harnessed to allow fast and simple maintenance. WP will even update itself at the click of a mouse.

If you are interested in any of the WP Themes, send me an email (with the subject: LE WordPress Themes) and I will get you hooked up. We offer hosting as well, and you manage your own domain (webmail, email and more) from an easy-to-use panel. If you would like, we can actually install your theme on our hosting for no additional fee. Our hosting is competitive and very high quality.

We hope to have the sales site up this weekend. But until then, we can invoice you through PayPal and get you started on your fantastic website.

See you soon on Lighting Essentials.

–don