http://www.photium.com/ The blog for one of the leading providers of websites for photographers. http://www.photium.com/blog.html The menu system has been improved to allow multiple levels of menu. This is useful if you have a lot of menu items and want to simplify it for your visitors. As an example, you could have a Services menu link and then sub-menu links could appear when the mouse is hovered over that menu item, for pages covering the different services you offer. You can set your menu up like this through the normal Menu items admin section and there are instructions there on what to do. Of course, if you have any problems or need help, please let us know. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html Improved URLs Some time ago we added a feature to edit the URLs of custom pages. So a page about services you offer with a URL like /page123.html could instead be something simpler like /services. This feature has now been rolled out to most other sections of your website, including Portfolios, Photos, News posts and Shop categories. We have set up automatic new URLs for most of your pages which had titles. If no title was present the URL will be the same as before. If you would like to change any of the URLs, this can now be done via the Meta tags and URLs page. When you add new photos, portfolios etc. the simple URLs will be automatically set up from the titles but you can edit them afterwards if you want. We have added some advice on how to assign URLs on the help section of the editing page. As well as looking better, these simpler URLs may also give your website a boost in search engine rankings, due to more keywords being included in the URL. Because the URLs have only recently been created, it will take some time for search engines to include them in their results. Hidden portfolios You can now set portfolios to be hidden from visitors. When a portfolio is hidden it won’t appear on your main Gallery page and if someone has the link for the portfolio, they won’t be able to view it’s contents. This feature can be used when uploading photos to a new portfolio and while you prepare it for public viewing. Or you can use it to take existing portfolios offline temporarily. You are still able to view hidden portfolios, providing you have logged into your admin area. New database servers As part of our continued work to ensure the fastest possible loading speeds for all websites we host, we have upgraded our main database servers and replication systems. After exhaustive planning and testing, this upgrade was completed without any problems. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html The Template design admin section has been updated with new options and improved functionality. Previously, some of the options such as the new google font feature, didn't automatically update the live preview of the changes being made. Now almost all options update the preview. More importantly, new features have been added. For example, you can now add drop-shadows or round the corners of your thumbnails and larger images. The size of some text elements can be changed more easily and the same drop-shadow and glow effects can be applied too. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html One of the most common questions we get asked is "How can I use font xyz" on my website. It's understandable it's a common question, as font-choice can make or break a good website design. To expand the choice of fonts you can use on your website, we've made it easy to use fonts from the new Google web fonts service. When editing your website design, just click the "Text" tab and you can choose from over 200 fonts and apply them to different sections of your website's text. You don't need to follow the more complicated instructions on the Google web fonts website, just decide on the font you want and select it on the drop-down provided when editing your design, click save and the font will be active on your website. Please do bear in mind that some fonts will be harder for visitors to read, so care should be taken when choosing. You may also notice we've optimised the design editing section, reducing the number of tabs and grouping things together more logically. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html It's been some time since the last blog post, partly because we've been so busy. This is due in large part to many of our wonderful customers recommending us to friends (Thank you! You know who you are!) and we've seen a lot of new customers as a result. Although it's been a bit quiet on the blog, we've not stopped adding improvements. It's just many of them have been a bit small to blog about on their own. Here are some you may not have noticed: Sales When setting up promotions to offer discounts to your customers, you can now limit the number of times a promotion code can be used. The admin section for adding purchasing options has been improved so a lot less clicking is needed to change or add prices. When an order comes in, the filenames of the original photos are shown on the order details, to make it easier for you to to locate the files. Customers on the Advanced package can now link to a new Client login page, so they only have to give their clients a password and their website domain. You can also easily link to this using the new menu admin section (see below). Gallery / website layout The menu admin section was previously clunky, being spread out over three sections. There was one section for adding menu links (in the custom page area) and then two on the Menu items admin page for arranging and re-naming. It was also difficult to link to particular sections of your website as you had to find the URL and paste it in manually. That's all changed and everything can be done through the one Menu items admin page. It's also easy to link to portfolios or sections like the "Latest photos" page, as we've put all those links into a selection list for you. Another common problem was when you have a lot of portfolios and add a new one it would go to the bottom of the list. Now when creating a new portfolio, you can choose to have the portfolio appear at the top of the list instead. You can do the same when uploading photos using the Java and Flash upload tools, having new photos appear at the start of the portfolio rather than the end. And also in these sections, you can create a portfolio on the first page of the upload process, rather than having to do it separately beforehand. In the General gallery settings admin section you can choose whether titles are shown underneath thumbnails on your Portfolio index pages, or above the large photos themselves. This can be overriden on a portfolio basis as well via the admin page for editing portfolios. Other usability improvements If you have a lot of images added to a news / blog post and don't need some of them, they can now be deleted. We've added thumbnail previews to the File upload section, to make it easier to find the image you want to use in a page. If you're using the sub-portfolio feature in the Gallery, many more admin sections now show the portfolio structure in the selection lists, making it easier to find the portfolio you want to edit, add photos to etc. Besides these smaller updates, work is being done on a major refresh to Gallery presentation options, more on that soon! http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html A range of changes and improvements have been made recently: Template designs You can now choose to add a background image to your website. Used carefully this can greatly enhance the visual impact of your design. You can also choose the alignment of your menu and header text. All options are available through the Template designs admin page when editing a design. Changes have also been made to make it faster to preview or apply designs and to edit your live design from your admin home page. Performance updates Always striving for the best possible system performance, we have been able to greatly improve search performance. Now results should always be displayed instantly. More general optimisations were also made, keeping websites loading fast at peak times. Orders Some customers have been reporting problems receiving notification emails from PayPal when they got new orders. So our servers now send an email to you too, to make sure you can respond to your clients promptly. The admin page displaying orders has also been re-organised so it is easier to browse past orders. Statistics When viewing detailed statistics for the photos of one of your portfolios, you can now change the sort order. So you can view photos by the number of views they have had, when they were uploaded, when they were last viewed or just view them by the order they appear in your portfolio. Other changes Simple URLs (set up on custom pages to change URLs like /page123.html to /services for example) can now be edited after you have set them. Although we still recommend avoiding doing this unless absolutely necessary, in case the URL has already been bookmarked or indexed by search engines. The News / Blog index page can now have text added to the top via the News settings admin page, as you can with most other website sections. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html The biggest change made recently is a major behind-the-scenes upgrade to new servers. This was completed successfully with zero downtime thanks to extensive planning and preparatory work. All websites are now being hosted from the new faster servers. Work has also been carried out on improving the admin areas, including: The help section for formatting code has been re-written and is easier to access Several admin areas are now broken into tabbed sections as they were previously quite long to scroll through The list on the portfolio editing section is now tiered so any sub-portfolio structure you have set up is clearer When deleting a portfolio with sub-portfolios, you can choose to delete those sub-portfolios at the same time Various other small tweaks, such as more preview links after changes have been made We'd also like to take this opportunity to again mention that we welcome suggestions for improving the usability of the admin areas. So if there's something you feel could be changed to save you some more time, please let us know. Finally a small tweak has been made to the Blog mode option. This shows the content of News / Blog posts actually on the index page, so visitors don't have to open each post to read it. You can now have this same format on your Home page news section via the option on the News / Blog settings page. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html As well as search engines, social networks can be a valuable source of traffic to your website. To make it easier to integrate links with websites like Facebook we have added a Social network admin section. This includes instructions on how to add the popular "Like" Facebook buttons to various sections of your website. It only takes a minute and you don't have to have a Facebook account. This new feature is entirely optional and if you don't choose to enable it nothing on your website has changed. http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html A number of new features and improvements have been added recently: New Sales status admin section If you have a lot of portfolios and have set different pricing on a portfolio or photo basis it becomes easy to lose track of which pricing you applied to which portfolio, which have sales enabled / disabled etc. The new Sales status admin section gives you an instant overview, together with appropriate links to quickly edit your sales options. New fixed discounts Previously the Promotions admin section only allowed percentage discounts for your clients. Now you can choose to set up a fixed amount discount if you prefer. E.g. Visitors can enter code TENOFF to get £10.00 of all orders over £50.00. Improved uploading The Java and Flash upload pages now both have a live upload counter and thumbnail, so you can keep a closer eye on your upload progress and your overall gallery status. Improved Sub-portfolio feature Previously when creating sub-portfolios you needed to manually apply a thumbnail to the parent portfolio. Now one will be shown automatically from the sub-portfolios. Improved Easy URL feature The Easy URL feature is useful for creating links for advertising or marketing material, when you want to track how many people have visited through that URL. It's now possible to reset the counters for these URLs. Improved servers Although it won't be noticeable to you or your website's visitors, we've been making a number of improvements to our server infrastructure recently. The most important of which is a change to our database configuration which makes it more resilient to server failure, ensuring we maintain our excellent uptimes! http://www.photium.com/blog.html http://www.photium.com/blog.html Some new features have recently been implemented, you can now: Re-assign original file-names as photo titles Sometimes you may forget to tick the box to use the file-names as your photo titles and have to re-upload them all again. Now you can just click the link to batch edit the portfolio and scroll to the bottom where you'll see an option to instantly re-assign all the original file-names as the photo titles. Rotate photos quicker If you need to rotate a large number of photos in a portfolio, then on the batch photo editing pages you can set all photos to be rotated and then disable rotation for photos that don't need it. Rather than having to edit each one individually. Search more areas of your website The built-in search engine on your website now includes all your Custom pages, News / blog posts and Other items for sale shop section. Adjust your home page slide show speed If you find the slide show on your home page too slow or fast, you can now alter the speed of it via the Home page settings admin page. Browse FAQ entries more easily The admin FAQ section as well as being searchable is now also easier to browse. With the main sections appearing in a list which expands when you click on a main heading. Making it quicker to find answers to common issues. http://www.photium.com/blog.html