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Looking for a way to have a photographer site with client access

Hello,

I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction with a solution I’m looking for…

Along with my web design services, I do photography. I want to create a site where my clients can log in and be automatically directed to their photos and be able to download them.

I found this – http://www.wp-client.com – but I was hoping to find something from WPMU. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Kevin

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:14:05
  • Timothy
    • Chief Pigeon

    Hey there,

    WP Client is a nice option, I’ve seen a few members go for this. Upload, give access, job done.

    Another option you might like to consider would be Multisite. Each site would be your clients own site, they get their own username and password so they can access the content from the front end.

    You could then turn off access for anyone else using our Multisite Privacy plugin:

    https://wpmudev.com/project/sitewide-privacy-options-for-wordpress-mu/

    They don’t even need to be admins, they just need to be users of that site.

    I like Multisite, I think there are a lot of possibilities and this is one of them.

    This way you could also customise the theme for presentation if you really wanted, find a nice theme that has some colour options and styling and then this way it matches their day and photos to give a really personal presentation of their memories.

    If you wanted you could even set up a shop type environment so they can order extras, more work involved on this though so you need to think about if you want to go that direction.

    Hope this helps give you some ideas :slight_smile:

    Take care.

  • TheGoogleGeek
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Hello,

    I was thinking about the multisite direction, but it ends up being too much work to customize each client’s site. I’d rather have a more simple, uniformed structure for all clients and be able to manage every detail from one central location. I think I’ll just sign up for the wp-client.

    Thanks for your thoughts!

  • Timothy
    • Chief Pigeon

    Hey again,

    It’s the weekend, hope you’re having a fantastic one! :slight_smile:

    You wouldn’t have to customise them all if you didn’t wish, and you could infact create a template for the sites using our New Blog Template:

    https://wpmudev.com/project/new-blog-template/

    This way you could show the images in galleries and make a real impression.

    Don’t get me wrong WP-Client looks awesome, and as I said I know some members go for it, but I like presentation for photo’s and that’s probably down to my wife. My wife is a photographer although the last 3 to 4 years she’s been taking some time off to look after our kids (one 2 year old, two 7 month old twins) so she closed the business.

    My wifes site isn’t up anymore but when it was she had client areas to display their special day and it made a huge impact on return sales because most other companies didn’t go to this extent, you could even reorder photos and albums, the client would often discover other photos they’d missed the first time.

    Anyway, if you wanted to not bother with multisite you could still do it this, totally slipped my mind before but what about this:

    – Single site.

    – Each client get their own page (you create a page).

    – Display photos like a gallery, you could use WordPress default gallery or a gallery type theme for your site.

    – Protect their content behind a password.

    To protect the content you can use our plugin here:

    https://wpmudev.com/project/password-protect-selected-content/

    That should save you money from buying another plugin too :slight_smile:

    Hopefully this will get you on the way, any questions then please let me know.

    Take care.

  • TheGoogleGeek
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Hey,

    I like these ideas. The only thing is that I don’t offer prints or re-orders. My clients pay for the photo shoot which includes the cost of owning the full-size photos, which I’ve been simply uploading to Dropbox or providing on a thumb drive.

    I want to make the photos available for viewing and downloading only. I may want to implement some sort of payment feature in the future (pay extra for full-size photos), but for now I want to make it as simple as possible for my clients.

    I think it’s a great idea to show them in a gallery but there’s no way to select and download or batch download.

    Regards.