Shape your website design to your own tastes when you use this content management system and a local server to build and test your ideas

So far in this series we’ve looked at a variety of ways to get increased exposure for your images, by putting them in front of an online audience. And as we’ve seen, there is more than one way of doing this, including using a website-builder service, which we looked at last month.

But for those happy with the idea of going behind the curtain and spending time noodling around with the back end of a website, there is an alternative: build your photography site using a content management system (CMS).

A CMS is what holds the contents of a website, and is driven by a database. This is where your images, and the relevant information to accompany them, are stored; the CMS accepts requests from a remote computer and instructs the server to send the data.

WordPress or Drupal are two popular CMSs; both offer plenty of options for customisation, so you can extend the scope of your site further down the line. Although Drupal - which we’ll take a look at next month - is the more sophisticated of the two systems, WordPress is more widely used and will comfortably meet most users’ needs.