The Photium Blog

It's now possible to categorise your news / blog posts. This is the first new feature of several that are designed to make your news section more suitable for blogging.

You can add and edit categories via the news settings admin page. Then when creating or editing news / blog posts you can assign categories to them.

E.g. You could have a category for personal posts and a category for photography posts. Visitors only interested in photography posts can click to view all of them on one page.

Another new feature that makes it easier to blog, is the blog post option. This can also be enabled on the news settings page. It will make posts be displayed in full on the news / blog index page, instead of just the title link showing. You can override this behaviour by optionally adding a summary for the post, which is useful for very long blog posts.

You can now add text to your website search page. This could be used to give examples of search phrases for your visitors to use. Or you could add a note asking them to contact you if they can't find what they are looking for.

The text can be added through the Search settings admin page.

Next time you update your website you will see the text box areas have some new formatting options above them.

These makes it easier to change text sizes, add lists and links etc. You can also click the green tick icon to have a preview of the page before saving it, which will update automatically as you make changes.

We will be adding more functionality to this new feature to make it easier to add images as well.

If for any reason you would like to disable this feature, you can in the personal settings area. If you have any feedback or problems, please let us know.

The shopping process for visitors to your website has been made even easier. Now when they click to buy an image, the purchasing options appear below straight away. As opposed to the old system which transferred them to another page that they had to return from to browse more photos. It is also faster to purchase multiple items. This will make the buying process faster and easier for visitors, increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

There is nothing you need to change to take advantage of this, it has been applied to all Photium websites.

As the first of several new features and improvements we're making to the sales features, you can now separate your print size / purchase options into categories.

This makes the purchasing process easier for your customers, as the list of purchasing options will be clearer and simpler, encouraging sales. It also allows you to extend the range of purchasing options available to your customers and at the same time reduces the complexity for them, compared to the old system.

This new facility is explained in more detail, with examples on the right-hand side of your Print sizes admin page.

If you experience any problems or have any questions about this new feature, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Although it's already possible to get excellent search engine placements with a Photium website we've been busy planning and making improvements to help increase search engine visitors to your website.

As the first phase of these improvements, it's now possible to edit the meta tags for more sections of your website. These meta tags are used by search engines like Google to display the link and description that shows on the search results your website may appear on. So editing these to be descriptive and inviting for visitors to click on can increase traffic.

Another new improvement is being able to set simpler URLs for custom pages you have set up. Previously the pages would have a URL like /page123.html but you can now set it to be something like /london-wedding-photography. This can have a small benefit in positioning your pages higher on search engine results and can also make the page appear more relevant to search engine users looking through pages of results. We plan to extend this facility to more sections in the near future.

Changes have recently been made "behind the scenes" on the servers that power your website. A sophisticated new performance enhancing system has been implemented. This will mean your website pages will load for visitors even faster than they did before and the new system frees resources at peak times.

A time-saving change has been made to how HTML can be added to pages of your website. Previously we recommended adding the [html] tag as the first item in a large text box. This turned off the automatic line breaking that would stop some HTML code from working but you had to use HTML paragraph tags for the line breaks. Now if you enter [htmlbr] instead of [html], you can enter HTML and still have automatic line breaks.

And one more time-saver is that it is now easier to reply to messages visitors send through your website. Previously you had to copy and paste the recipient's address each time but thanks to the effectiveness of our anti-spam measures this is no longer necessary and if the visitor has supplied a valid email address, you can reply directly.

Some new features and changes have been made that haven't previously been announced.

Most viewed photos pages
Custom contact form
Admin site search

A new help feature has been added. Now at the bottom of many pages of your website, a help section will appear, relevant to the page you are viewing.

It contains advice on the changes you can make to that page and direct links to the relevant admin sections.

This is particularly useful for new Photium customers who may not be familiar with the different admin sections and what can be done on them. But it is also useful for all customers, as it can speed up the process of making changes.

The help boxes will only appear to you when you have logged into your website admin area. You can also disable the feature if you don't need it.

The "Other items for sale" section you can use to sell items such as deposits, gift vouchers or equipment etc. has now been updated. If you have added categories to this section, you can illustrate each category with a thumbnail. You can also change the layout of the categories from a single list to a multi-column format.

Both of these new options can be enabled via the Items settings admin page.