For photographers
I have run my wordpress blog as a wedding photographer, for over five years now. I have used many themes, from Tofurious to Genesis, and many others along the way. I thought I would write a Pro Photo Blogs review, since it is the most well known and popular theme for photographers.
Let me back up. Along with a degree in art and photography, I studied multimedia web design for a year, and spent ten years in the Information Technology field. I’m a strange mix of artistic and technology oriented. For the first year and half that I ran my photography business, I refused to pay the $200 for Pro Photo because I didn’t need it. I can hand-code html / css, and a little bit of php.
I spent hours and hours tweaking code and getting things right. Then a month later I wouldn’t be happy with the site again, so I’d tweak it more. Finally Pro Photo’s 30 day money back guarantee tempted me. I set up my site in no time at all, and I was done. Sure I still make changes, but they don’t take any time. Most important, Pro Photo saves me time with every blog post.
Here are my favorite features:
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It’s quick to setup.
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When you know it well, you can customize anything about it. It’s amazingly flexible.
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Gorgeous templates are available, and many designers specialize in designing for Pro Photo.
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You can use it as a traditional blog, or a true blogsite
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INSERT ALL. This is the featured I missed so much for inserting images. There are other plugins that do the same thing but theirs is much better.
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Space your images on your entire blog in one click.
- Easily add sharing and social media icons.
Here are the two complaints I hear most:
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Everyone uses it, so it’s hard to stand out. This is true IF you use it out of the box. You can do anything you want with it, and you can even pay to remove the Pro Photo Blogs credit at the bottom once you have created your own look.
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The SEO may not be the best. I do agree that the built-in SEO tool isn’t the greatest, but there are tons of WordPress plugins, and Pro Photo gives you the ability to turn off their built in SEO. I’m not saying there may not be better themes for extremely clean code and ideal SEO but considering it’s benefits in other places, I think it’s more than acceptable.
Customer service is very important to me. I only work with companies that go out there way to keep their clients happy. Pro Photo has insanely good customer service. They answer my over the top complicated questions, quickly and thoroughly. They also have a database of articles and video tutorials.
I have used Pro Photo for three versions now. Something I really appreciate is that when they do a big upgrade to a new version, there are always enough new features to really justify it, and the fee is nominal. Between versions, they regularly role out improvements, which if you like, you can have automatically updated. They seem to do an amazing job keeping up with the times too. I left Pro Photo twice because I was looking for something more, a feature or widget, some sort of capability. Both times, within three months, they ended up adding in those features and more.
I highly recommend Pro Photo Blogs.
Edited 12/16/2014: I now offer custom Pro Photo website design. Please check out my new services.
