I’ve had a few people ask how I set up the home page slider on my photography portfolio, so here’s a tutorial.  First off, thanks go out to Jeremy at the Minimatica theme forum for pointing out that I should not display my email address in the “About” or “Contact” sections of the website.  He recommended using a WordPress contact plugins and Captcha.  I decided to go with Fast Secure Contact Form, and Akismet to keep the spam under controll.  I install these on all of my blogs right after I set up WordPress.

I love Minimatica for WordPress–the theme is really easy to set up and I like the look of the home page “slider,” but I wanted a home page with categories that a visitor could click on to open up themed galleries.  The stock slider opens into a single image, but I wanted to see a gallery.

My home page consists of just four posts.  I wanted the “Latest” category to show up first (on the left side of the slider), so I waited to post that category until last.  I had all of the photos that I wanted to use in my individual galleries organized ahead of time in folders on my computer so I could upload them easily when I posted.  I didn’t worry about the order that the photos appeared.  One of the only drawbacks of this system is that new photo posts will file down to the end of the gallery–there are ways around this problem, including removing all of the old images and re-posting the new photos with the old group in the order that you want them to appear.

The workflow for the first four posts goes like this:

• Go to your WordPress dashboard, click on “Categories,” and set up four new categories in any order with names that represent the types of photos you want to showcase.
• Go to Posts>Add New and give your new post a title that matches one of the names from the newly created categories.
• Go to “Format” and pick “Gallery,” then pick the category that you want from the list below the format box.
• Click “set featured image”.  When the box pops up, select files from your photo folder, upload your images, rename them, make any other necessary changes, and then pick the one that best represents your category and that will appear in the slider on your home page.
• Repeat this process three times.

Next, I set up a menu (click “Menus” under “Appearance”).  Mine looks like this:

“Home” is a custom link (set up on the menu panel) which connects back to the main slider’s URL.  “Blog” is also a custom link, set up the same way, which points to a sub-domain’s URL.  I set up the default WordPress theme on the sub-domain and use it like a traditional blog.  “About,” “Services,” and “Links” are all just regular pages.  I’m using the Fast Secure Contact Form on my “About” and “Services” pages.

OK, I hope my explanation isn’t too simplistic.  For more information on setting up your Minimatica photography portfolio have a look at the complete unofficial Minimatica users guide here.