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FYI - I searched the forum first and it lead me to this thread with no useful answer.
–William
http://williambeem.comPerhaps you can, but I wouldn't recommend doing it. If you're uploading photos larger than you display them, it still takes time to download the photo at the original resolution and then display it the size you want. That's slowing down your site, and people leave slow sites.
Sliders use the same dimensions for each photo, so give it what it wants. If you want the visitor to see a larger view of the photo when someone clicks, send them to another URL with the larger version of the photo. That way you eliminate delay for most of your visitors and it won't take so much time to load just one larger image.
–William
http://williambeem.comThat depends upon your skills. If you design with code, then Genesis is better than starting from scratch. If you customize existing themes using non-coding skills, you probably won't like it. Better to go to ThemeForest and find one of the top-selling themes that gives you much more flexibility without the need for code.
Basically, I agree with Ren. Genesis is for coders, not so much for designers.
I've abandoned Genesis for most of my sites because it lacks the flexibility I find in other products on ThemeForest. Granted, it's fast and has good SEO. On the other hand, the themes just don't keep up with modern design, particularly for use of images.
I bought into Genesis with all of my heart when I first found it, spending the money for the complete package. Now there's only one theme that I used from StudioPress (Eleven40 is great for text blogs), but everything else of mine that's driven by images uses themes that I found on ThemeForest.
They're much easier to customize, yield better visual results, take less time, and I haven't found any significant differences in performance or SEO. In fact, I've been getting more traffic since I left Genesis themes behind.
You can do great things on the Genesis platform if you're a coder. If that's your strength, then I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Genesis to you. If not, I'd look elsewhere. I did.
–William
http://williambeem.comNo, I don't believe that's the case. Rainmaker is a new service offering that combines many of the Copyblogger products into a turnkey offering. You can still buy Genesis, host it on Synthesis, and run your own site.
This is for folks who don't want to roll their own and deal with the work involved in running a site. With that in mind, it has a lot of nice features. It also has a lot of limitations compared to your own hosted site, as you can't add plugins or a theme that doesn't run on Genesis. There are other issues with payments, backups and services that may or may not get resolved over time.
I've read a lot of positive reviews, and a few showed the warts in the service. It's not cheap as a hosting service alone, but it's more than just a web host and a theme. Whether it's right for you depends upon how you run your business.
–William
http://williambeem.comThere is no plugin for WordPress that can truly secure your site. By the time it runs, there are too many other ways that someone could compromise your site. I realize that you aren't looking for a silver bullet, but the best thing you can do is learn the various forms of attack and vulnerabilities of your WordPress site. With that in mind, I shared two different articles that do a good job explaining some of the issues. I hope this is helpful and gives you some useful info.
http://blog.sucuri.net/2012/08/wordpress-security-cutting-through-the-bs.html
http://moz.com/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-wordpress-security
–William
http://williambeem.comOf the StudioPress themes, I'd probably recommend the new Centric theme. The main page is simple and allows you to present your information in sections. Then you can have a section that links to posts containing your audio samples, along with some descriptive text to help SEO for those files.
–William
http://williambeem.comThere are a couple of plugins that may do what you want. The first is Justified Image Grid. It can let you create the thumbnails in a variety of ways, looking like Flickr, Google+, or whatever else you want to create.
Next, look at FooBox as your lightbox plugin. It integrates with Justified Image Grid and does an excellent job of displaying your photos.
I have an example of both on my site - http://williambeem.com/want-to-improve-how-your-photos-look-on-wordpress/
Bear in mind that you also need to test with iOS devices. I screwed up one of the customization options and it wasn't showing properly there, but the tools do work well with mobile devices.
–William
http://williambeem.comWhat do you mean that your authorship is broken? Keep in mind that Google is reducing the amount of author photos that show up in search results, particularly targeting people in the Realty industry.
–William
http://williambeem.comI was also one of the folks waiting on Denali, which now seems to be Parallax Pro. Lots of beautiful things that I like about it.
Yet, there are also limitations. The Parallax pages seem to be limited to the Home page, and then limited to a set number of sections. You can't build it up with more sections using it as-shipped. I was hoping it would allow us to build more pages with no set limit of sections. Had that been the case, I would have switched immediately for my photography blog.
It's a lovely theme and great for those whose needs fit the mold. In my case, I think I'm going to migrate to the Divi theme from Elegant Themes. Another possibility may be to use the Builder plugin from Elegant Themes on a StudioPress child theme.
Time to do some testing to see if that works and how it affects performance.
–William
http://williambeem.comSummer,
I'm probably confusing a lot of things. All I know is that it's making my images look like crap and I want to change it.
Thank you for the theme recommendation, but it's not catching my eye.
I really do like a lot of the StudioPress themes. That's why I bought the developer package and use several of them on my other sites. For photographer, though, the StudioPress designers just don't seem to get it. I'm frustrated because I see things that I know could work (or used to work and then they botched it).
The truth is that I'm probably going to have to look elsewhere for a photography theme that meets my needs, because it's not going to come from StudioPress. Kind of makes me sad to finally give up on this product where it ought to be able to shine.
–William
http://williambeem.comAnita,
I just tried the code. Not the size I want - in fact, the size is what I hate - but I see where you're going with the code and I should be able to adjust it. Thanks.
If only I could adjust this from the menu in WordPress or StudioPress, it could actually be a user-friendly interface.
–William
http://williambeem.comOK, I just read the instructions. I guess Parallax Pro is "not it" for me. Too limited for the display I hoped it would provide.
–William
http://williambeem.comI used to really love Minimum. It was my favorite theme for a photography blog because of the large image on the home page. No longer the case, though. They changed the theme with Minimum Pro to use backstretch, which means you can't determine how your photo will display. It's maddening for any artist.
Other than that one gripe, I really enjoyed Minimum Pro. I'd go back if they ever fix that "improvement."
–William
http://williambeem.comThanks for all the comments. I've been traveling today and haven't had a chance yet to try some of the suggestions, but I'll give that a shot tonight. I also received some feedback from the Support folks to delete the home.php file to get the kind of thumbnails I want, so I'll also give that a try.
Equally important, I see the Parallax Pro theme is out now. Haven't had a chance to look at the instructions yet, but that's my new theme if I can create portfolio pages with the same Parallax as it shows on the home page.
That would be a killer plugin for all of the other Genesis themes, too. Create as many full width, parallax portfolios as you need on any theme. I'd be in heaven!
–William
http://williambeem.comYes, and I reviewed the instructions again before I posted here. Unfortunately, it offers no help for understanding why the thumbnails on the home page are different than thumbnails on the blog page.
–William
http://williambeem.comI don't understand the question. You can see what's happening on my site. The demo shows a full image. My site shows something else. That's the only comparison I'm making.
–William
http://williambeem.comThank you, Anita. I'll give this a try.
As a customer, though, I'm getting soured on StudioPress. They pay a lot of attention to type and presenting words, and that's a good thing. At the same time, they seem to be actively dumbing down the display of photos. The backstretch on Minimum Pro is a prime example, and now this.
The photos on my home page look nothing like the display on the Eleven40 Pro demo page. It seems like there should be an easier way to correct the problem rather than expecting users to modify the code.
Perhaps it's time to submit a ticket and see what official reply I get, though past responses don't give me much hope.
–William
http://williambeem.comThanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't appear to do a thing at all. I've emptied my cache and reloaded several times after changing the settings - nothing.
So this is in the functions file? Then it's another example of StudioPress hating photographers.
–William
http://williambeem.com