I wanted a small place where my photographs and my thoughts could sit together. Instagram is fine for sharing images, but there is little room for writing. This website helps me with that. And as for the domain, fabpx.com, FAB are my initials, and “px” is for pixels. I wanted something short, so fabpx felt right.

I’m not a professional photographer and neither an expert at it and I’m also not a working IT professional. I’m a learner who photographs Lahore and writes simple notes from experience.

I looked at a few ready made services for photographers and also considered Drupal. In the end my use case did not need that level of ‘drupal’ complexity even though I like Drupal a lot. WordPress is built for blogging and this is a blog more than anything else. The mix of useful plugins and simple development made the choice easy.

I built it with a mobile first approach. It should hopefully be easy to read on a phone in vertical orientation with one thumb. I hope I was able to keep clutter and distractions to the minimum. The focus is on the image, the title, and a short note.

Navigation is kept light. I started with three links ‘Images, Notes, and About ‘ and later added Contact because it was necessary.

Under the hood it uses the GeneratePress theme and Pods for custom content types. The rest is mostly CSS and few small code snippets. Simple is easier to keep fast and tidy.

For other photographers:

For anyone thinking about building a website, my experience has been that simplicity helps. Skip heavy premade themes and bloated page builders. Gutenberg on WordPress was good enough for me. Begin clean, add only what you need and let the photos and text lead. In my case, a lighter setup stayed easier to manage and quicker to load.

Based on my epxerience some quick pointers

• Pick a lightweight theme like GeneratePress or anything similarly lean
• Use as few plugins as possible
• Keep navigation short and clear
• Design for the phone first and test it with one thumb
• Write short notes next to your images to help people connect
• Go with a managed hosting plan with backups
• Cloudflare, Wordfence, Jetpack for security
• Make regular backups of the site and your images

Hoping this note helps another photographer get started with a simple, fast website.

Update (Nov. 2025): Even after many tweaks, the site stayed slow and got slower as I added content. My webhost (Cloudways) has a new Lightning Stack, and I’m trying it on a trial basis. So far it feels a lot faster. I’ll share more after some use.