http://www.photium.com/ The blog for one of the leading providers of websites for photographers. http://www.photium.com/blog.html A new Java upload option has been introduced which fixes some issues. It's now possible to upload Jpegs with a grayscale profile, where previously they would stop the upload from completing. There is also better compatability when using the IPTC option and images should be resized and uploaded faster. We encourage all customers to try this new upload method by simply ticking the Beta option on the Java upload admin page. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html Now the new design system is launched with the larger layouts, we have introduced an option to have larger image uploads. This feature can be enabled as soon as you have applied one of the new designs to your website. For full instructions and links, please log into your website admin area and see the announcement there. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html It has taken longer than we anticipated but the new template design system is now live. All websites will continue to use the existing design from the old system until a new design is chosen but here are some of the advantages of the new system: Far more control - Rather than just being able to select from a handful of colours you can now choose from thousands and change all the different component parts of your website. Range of designs - In the past there was one design that could be configured with a small selection of colours and backgrounds. Now there are 10 different designs and each can be set up with a colour scheme exactly how you want it. We've created a selection of colour schemes for each design to get you started. Preview changes - Whereas the old system used to make changes live instantly, the new system gives you two preview modes. The first is a basic one that changes as you select different colours and is a rough preview of how your colour scheme will look. Then there is an actual real-time preview, so you can view all your website pages with the new design before making it live. Save variations - You can save as many different design colour schemes as you want, rather than just having one that has to be changed each time. So you can update, save and switch as often as you like. Larger designs - All the new designs are larger than the old one and will fill the screen of the most common display resolutions. This size increase has also allowed us to introduce the new larger image uploads and please see the other recent announcement for information on that. Vertical menus - If you have a lot of menu items your website will benefit from one of the vertical side menu designs, that will make it easier for visitors to browse. To try out the new system, please visit the template designs section of your website admin area. We'll be adding more designs and other exciting options in the future but wanted to get this first stage of the new design system out because it is already overdue. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html As part of the preparation for the larger photo uploads and new template designs that will be coming soon, some improvements have been made to the Java upload facility. If you have added IPTC data to your photos, the title, caption and keywords will now be saved during the upload, so you don't have to re-enter them. The system will also check the orientation data in EXIF (if present), so that photos that need rotating will be automatically rotated. Meaning it doesn't have to be done manually prior to uploading or afterwards in the admin area. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html 18th May UPDATE: The maintenance described below has now taken place and went as planned with no interruption to service. Some of the network hardware used with our servers is being upgraded on Monday 18th May between 6-9am (BST) 1-3am (EDT). This upgrade will provide additional network capacity. During this 3 hour maintenance period, the Photium service will only be unavailable for up to five minutes. Please rest assured that every care is being taken to keep the outage to the absolute minimum. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html This service from Google allows you to see reports how about how your website is appearing on Google and provides other tools too. If you haven't yet signed up for the Google Webmaster Tools service and would like to, there is now an admin option to add the verification meta tag they require. For more information and a quick start guide, please visit the search engine settings admin page on your website. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html The Photo comment, Contact, Purchase enquiry and Guestbook forms on websites we host are now all protected by our newly developed anti-spam protection. This is following a successful trial of the updated protection methods on the new Custom form feature. As well as cutting down or eliminating any automated spam that gets sent to the forms, it is also easier for website visitors to send messages. This is because the previous anti-spam question and answer section has been removed. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html As well as being able to sell photos in the main gallery, there is also the Other items shop feature, for selling things like deposits, gift vouchers, albums or anything else you want. If you're using this feature and have a lot of items, you can now choose to separate them into categories, so visitors can browse smaller ranges with less scrolling. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html Using the new custom form feature it's now possible to add forms to Photium websites for visitors to submit information. E.g. Add a contact form with more fields than the default one, such as a "Where did you hear about us?" field. The form system uses some new anti-spam protection we are trialling, which if successful will be rolled out to the existing Guestbook, Photo comment and Contact page forms. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html To make it even easier for website visitors to find what they're looking for, the website search feature now shows a preview of the results found while the visitor is browsing them. This saves them having to return to the search results page to move between the results. http://www.photium.com/blog.html