Pro Photo Blogs Review
For photographers
I have run my wordpress blog as a wedding photographer, for over five years now. Â I have used many themes, from Tofurious to Genesis, and many others along the way. Â 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. Â 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. Â I’m a strange mix of artistic and technology oriented. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â This is the featured I missed so much for inserting images. Â 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. Â This is true IF you use it out of the box. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â I only work with companies that go out there way to keep their clients happy. Â Pro Photo has insanely good customer service. Â They answer my over the top complicated questions, quickly and thoroughly. Â They also have a database of articles and video tutorials.
I have used Pro Photo for three versions now. Â 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. Â Between versions, they regularly role out improvements, which if you like, you can have automatically updated. Â They seem to do an amazing job keeping up with the times too. Â I left Pro Photo twice because I was looking for something more, a feature or widget, some sort of capability. Â 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. Â Please check out my new services.