WordPress.com courts photographers, graphic artists

WordPress.com is courting photographers, videographers, illustrators and other artists to its publishing platform by launching dedicated portfolio section on its website.

WordPress.com has always given its users access to portfolio-type themes in its 200+ strong Theme Showcase, but this is the first time that WordPress.com has prioritised this vertical. Last year, the company launched similar verticals for band pages, restaurants and wedding sites, according to TechCrunch.

There are currently 60 million websites worldwide powered by WordPress.com or WordPress, its open-source sister (our content management system of choice). That’s one in every six websites on the internet today. WordPress.com alone attracts 3.4 billion pageviews per month.

The dedicated portfolio section on WordPress.com currently has 31 themes, both free and premium. Each theme can be customised heavily if you pay $30 per year for the privilege.

Given that photographers in particular care greatly about the look and feel of their portfolio sites, this has the potential to earn Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, some decent currency.

Automattic also recently announced Jetpack 2.0, an official plugin that brings some of WordPress.com’s best features to the company’s self-hosted publishing solution, WordPress.