How to create professional photo gallery or photo-portfolio--tutorial.jcwcn.com

Nowadays there are many ways to express yourself with the help of art. One of these ways is photography. You can learn how to make professional photos and use Photoshop by visiting any tutorial website as well as try to use this knowledge to earn money from your hobby and maybe someday this will transform in main source of earning money. If this already happened or you’re in the way to become a professional world-known photographer I’ll teach you how to make a bright and stunning portfolio in the internet.

Choosing template design

But after doing a quick research I find out that this niche is very competitive, that’s why I decided to make website portfolio based on XML Dynamic Flashwebsite template! I have never customized this type of templates before but they are so awesome so I decided that it’s time to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

This will cost you just $60-70 and at the same time you will get a great result. I recommend you to review ourwebsite templates. Browse the category “Art & Photography”. Among all I liked template #22792 so here it is:

Regular price for it is $72 US Dollars but template is really awesome! I think this is exactly what we need - let’s buy it. Now we need to make custom changes with the template to get the best look and feel. Despite the fact that I have a design and template code for their changes also require certain skills, it’s not as hard as their creation from the beginning.

In case of a low-budget project, you may take advantage of free web templates that will help you solve both problems: time and money. FreeTemplatesOnline.com offers quality free web page designs that can be easily customized and used as a basis for your website.

Template customization

If you are a web designer and have no any knowledge of HTML, XML or don’t want to spend time and efforts to learn it - you can easily turn into TemplateTuning.com where you can order the template customization at an affordable price. And along with the rest of the way we will go full customization of your template.

For the full-fledged website we need only design of the home page, rest will be loaded inside flash. As I said we decided to make website portfolio based on XML Dynamic Flash, that’s why we don’t need to make any changes to PSD, HTML or FLASH files. All the information we might need to change placed in .XML files in your template catalog and photos in your gallery are tfile_[categoty-name]_**.jpg files.

HTML customization

So lets’ change title of our page and it will be the only changes that we need in HTML.

Open index.html in any HTML editor and change

<title>Jack Blatt | Photoportfolio</title>

That’s all the changes you need to do in HTML.

XML customization

Now we need to change the name of template on yours. Change the website name on yours in header and footer. You must edit “tfile_main.xml” file in the “site_flash” folder to change the text. DO NOT rename this file! Otherwise, you will not be able to edit text without Macromedia Flash software. Open “tfile_main.xml” file in text editor (e.g. Notepad or Dreamweaver). In this file you will find all the variables. Find the variable you need and type in your text after the sign of equality (=).

For example we need to change line:
<item name=”companyName”>maroquin</item>
to
<item name=”companyName”>Jack Blatt</item>

After header changes do the same with footer, find <item name=”copyright”> line. I recommend you if you are not sure how the parameter should name - just find it by typing existing text, change it on needed and check by reloading the page. Or if you make online changes you need to upload all files from the template “site_flash” folder to your “public_html” or “www” folder on server. All files should be placed in one folder.

As to menu, we can extract 4 main sections that might be helpful for you:

About
Portfolio
Contacts

The template already has “About” page named “My info”. For a portfolio it has 3 different sections: “SERENITY PEOPLE”, “WILD BUNCH” and “ABSTRACT SERIES” that you can rename them in compliance with your styles of art.

I will rename it to my own and you can always download my XML file HERE by selecting “Save as…” menu and see how it should be done and compare it to yours.

Now find following section:

and change it into yours custom text. Like mine:

Reload page and if you did everything right, you should see the result:

Now change the photo. Note: Your picture must have the same width and height as the original one for page displaying! Find the photo in your template folder. Its name is tfile_pic1.png and dimensions are 193px on 187px. Make your photo exact same! Replace old photo with yours and reload page. See the new photo? Then you made it all right.

You can change ANY photo the same way, even background (it’s tfile_people_1.jpg, so replacing it you replacing background). Do the rest of main page changes and let’s compare our screenshots:

Don’t forget to update “tfile_main.xml” and all changed graphics on web server via FTP. In the same way you should customize rest of pages.

To make contact form working open “form05configuration.xml” and put here
<emailTo>your_email@domain.com</emailTo>
your real e-mail address.

Congratulations! Now you know how to perform changes to XML Flash site. Yes, that’s all. Disappointed? But it’s really that simple, except you need to add more galleries or make more difficult changes in templates design or layout. But even in this case you can ask specialists from TemplateTuning to make such operations for affordable price.

If you expect any issues with the XML Flash websites you can view these video tutorials or leave a comment and I’ll be glad to answer all your questions.

Website Promotion

After that you’ll need to update website new and portfolio as far as you perform orders. You can also try to promote you site in Internet. You will find information you need for the site promotion on Web Design Library. It’s pretty easy if you have enough time and patience and also strong willing to learn and, later on, realize your promotion plan.

In case you don’t want to perceive all subtleties of SEO and website promotion and do this a bit routine though quite interesting works, you may follow my example and order website promotion services here http://www.webdesign.org/website-promotion/website-promotion-standard.php. I made some calculation and concluded that ordering of a Standard Package which costs $235 will be enough for the beginning. It sounds like a pretty expensive service (more over - ii costs double creation of the site), but remember that having bought the template in TemplateMonster or our website templates, we got a promo code with 50% discount! You just need to pay $115 in addition and promotion of your website will be entrusted to the Web Design Library experts’ team. It’s relatively low fee for making it easy for you clients to find your site by the keywords you need.

In any case it’s for you to decide. And I will gladly answer any question in comments. Good luck!

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