I’m going to continue with setting up my photography website using WordPress and Twenty Twelve theme (see the first post in the series).

As a reminder, this is how the home page should look like:

By default, WordPress shows latest blog posts on the home page of your site. Here is how to make it to show a single page instead. First, go to WordPress dashboard and click ‘Pages’ in menu on the left:

Then, click ‘Add New’ link:

Enter ‘Home’ as a title and leave /home as a permalink:

Select ‘Front Page Template’ in page attributes section on the right. Otherwise you will get a sidebar on this page.

Click ‘Publish’ button. The page is ready, now it’s time to make it the home page. Go to Settings, then Reading:

Change ‘Front page displays’ setting to a static page and select ‘Home’ as front page:

Here’s the result:

Our home page is almost ready. Now it’s time to add a big image to it. Go to Pages, then All Pages and click Edit link for the Home page:

Click ‘Add Media’ button:

Switch to Upload tab and select your file. The optimal image width for Twenty Twelve theme is 960 pixels. However you can upload a bigger image – WordPress will resize it automatically. The height doesn’t matter but I like image proportions to be close to the golden ratio.

Once upload is finished set the ‘Link To’ to None and Size to ‘Full Size’ under attachment display settings:

Click ‘Insert into page’ button. The image is in the post but WordPress helpfully made it fit its default column size (625 pixels). Switch to Text tab and remove width and height attributes from the img tag:

Now set template to ‘Full-width Page Template, No Sidebar’ and click Update button.

Voilà, home page in WordPress with a full-width image:

You can view result live: Acme Photography.

Let’s say I’m a professional photographer and I need a new website. The best thing to do generally is to ask someone else to do it. But what if I’m just starting out and don’t have money to spend on a fancy website? I can get a basic website for free using WordPress.

First of all, I’m going to create a mockup of my new website:

Home page should have a nice big image, a heading and a menu bar. The gallery page should have thumbnails. Visitor should be able to click on any thumbnail to view a bigger photo. Something like this:

Looks good! Next, I need to decide where I’m going to host my website. WordPress.com looks like a good option: it’s free (as long as your website address ends with .wordpress.com) and it is maintained by the same people that make WordPress.

Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a new account.

The address of my website is going to be acmephotography.wordpress.com

This is how my brand new website looks like:

Not very close to the mockup, isn’t it? Let’s fix it.

The next step is to choose a theme for my website. The problem with WordPress themes is that there are just too many of them. After some poking around I decided to try Twenty Twelve theme by the WordPress team. It looks nice and crisp. It has a menu on top. Also, it’s free! Here’s how to set it up.

Go to ‘My Blog’ on WordPress.com and click ‘Dashboard’ link there.

Move mouse over ‘Appearances’ link in the menu on left, then select ‘Themes’:

Search for ‘Twenty Twelve’ theme and click Activate button:

Close the dialog confirming that the theme has been activated. Go to Settings, then General. Set site title to ‘Acme Photography’. Remove tagline (set it to empty):

Don’t forget to click ‘Save Changes’ button. Now click on website name on the top left to view your website.

Behold: my new photography website, Acme Photography:

It has a title and a menu bar. However the front page doesn’t look right yet. I explain how to configure front page in my next post.