How can a great deal become even better?

One of the cool yet often overlooked Lightroom features is the Web Module. As a photographer, you undoubtedly want to show your work to your friends, clients and possibly even the whole world! However, if you’re like me and you think that css is a detective series with enough spinoff’s to make you dizzy and that flash is a synonym for a speedlight and not some web-programming language, then you know that designing your own photo website is a probably not the way to go if you want to get some more photography done before the end of this century.

Of course you can hire a web-designer to make a great looking site, but this can easily set you back a couple of G’s. And not all of you struggling-to-get-by freelancers have that kind of money lying around, do you? And if you do, you probably want to spend that on your next camera or lens, don’t you? I hear you loud and clear!)

So, what if I told you that someone who knows his Flash from his html from his css had already done all the heavy lifting for creating an out-of-the-box photography website for you and even better: what if that person had wrapped all this code (it’s no coincidence that website-language is called ‘code’: it’s a big sign to us, mere mortal photographers to not even try to understand it) into a nice Lightroom plugin?

Wouldn’t that be worth a 100 bucks to you? 200 anyone? Do I here 300 in the back of the room?

Well… this is exactly what Sean McCormack from Lightroom-Blog has done.

He’s made a highly configurable yet easy-to understand Lightroom Web Module Engine called LRB Portfolio. It allows you to design a complete photography portfolio website from within Lightroom’s Web Module, including galleries, an ‘about’ page, a ‘contact’ page and the like).

And the beauty is it won’t cost you thousands of dollars, not even hundreds. About 20 USD/15 Euro + VAT is what you’ll pay for the plugin. That’s one less CD or DVD to buy this week, and it’s all paid for.

Sean has just released a new, identically priced Lightroom Web Engine, called LRB Exhibition. I haven’t had the chance to play around with it yet, but below you find a screenshot from Sean’s site. It allows you to focus even more on your pictures.

Being the great lad that the is, Sean has made a good deal even better by offering a 20% discount on his plugins and other Lightroom goodies (such as his Graduated Filter Presets). Check (them) out before midnight of March 12th, because that’s when the discount ends. Make sure to use coupon code FOCUS20.

In future blogposts, I’ll discuss some other interesting web design plugins for Lightroom. Meanwhile, if you use one that you’re happy with, or have an example of a site you created with Sean’s or other Lightroom Web Engines, please enlighten us in the comments!