Previously, I’d shared with you how I’d built a portfolio website (a website designed to show off a artist or photographer’s body of work) using two blogging platforms, Blogger and Tumblr.

The idea behind these efforts was to take up the challenge of building on a free platform something that was as easy to maintain as a blog, but didn’t look like a ‘blog’.

Well, the power of WordPress compels me to build a fabulous portfolio site using that platform.  Now, this is really not in the same spirit as the prior challenges, as a self hosted WordPress site is not a free option (note, the free option, WordPress.com, would not work for this).  And WordPress as a platform is considerably more suited to an effort like this–it’s hardly hacking when you’re just using the platform as designed!  So it’s not really fair to say that WordPress kicks the pants off the other options — they didn’t start in the same place.

So, I redid my friend Grieg’s photography website.  Check it out here!

If you guys are interested, I’ll do a tutorial/tips/lessons learned, and post it over at Dabbled|Studios.  I’m trying to move all my website related blogging over there.

In short, WordPress gives you a ton of tools and plugins which can really produce a professional look.  I will eventually get around to redo-ing my own portfolio site, which is still in Tumblr from the previous experiments.  WordPress is miles above the free options (like Tumblr or Blogger), but the free options do have one huge advantage… Free!  WordPress is technically free as well, but you do have to have your own hosting, which will run you around 5-10$ per month.  Not a huge expense, but not free either.

And if you want to see what we started with, you can see what the free Blogger version looked like here.

And of course, if you need a wedding or childrens photographer and you live in Georgia, do consider Grieg!