We’re happy to announce we will be part of the WPPI 2011 trade show. WPPI stands for Wedding & Portrait Photographers International. Their annual convention is one of the biggest in the photography industry, with last year’s convention drawing over 12,000 photographers and several hundred exhibitors to their trade show.

The convention runs from February 17-24, with the Trade Show on the 21st through the 23rd. For anyone who hasn’t been, it is an amazing opportunity to learn from speakers and classes that offered throughout the week, meet and network with thousands of photographers, get inspiration from the incredible print competitions, and of course to meet us!

We will have some great giveaways and surprises, so keep following us and stay tuned for updates. We’ll be in booth #1453, if you’re there in person stop by and say hi!

It has been a couple weeks now since officially announcing our launch and in that time we have been working on some exciting new features.

More Font & Color Choices

One of the most requested features has been to add even better options for customizing our sites. In particular, people wanted color and font choices for the main menus. So last week we quietly released both to our Latte and Cuppa Joe themes. You can now choose from several fonts and colors for every aspect of the main menu, the headings for each page and post, and you can even choose between fonts for the text of the whole site.

EDIT: As of 9:00 PM Friday, we just added fonts and colors to the Espresso themes as well!

Fonts are notoriously plain in websites because browsers only support a handful of fonts that mostly look the same. To get around this, there is a technique known as “@font-face” that allows us to embed (almost) any font we would like to use. Thanks to the amazing font site FontSquirrel, we are able to offer a great selection of fonts to really customize your site.

You can find the new font options by logging into your site and visiting “BlogSite Options->Style Options->Font Options”.

Music

A close second to fonts has been music. We added a plugin called wpaudio that allows you to embed any mp3 file within any post or page anywhere on the site. You can find instructions for adding audio on our support site.

Video

The ability to add Video was always there but the way to do it is not immediately obvious. The only thing we did to make this easier was write up some instructions for adding video.

Better Support Documentation

This one is boring but important. As I mentioned above with music and video, we have added some improved documentation to the support site, making it even easier to get up and running.

More Themes coming soon…

Themes determine the overall look and layout of your site. Each of our themes has distinct font and color choices and can really change the feel of your site.

We currently have three to choose from:

• Latte – View Demo
• Cuppa Joe – View Demo
• Espresso – View Demo

The first step in customizing your site is to choose one of these themes. Then you can play with fonts and colors within each theme.

Every Photography BlogSites user will always have access to any new themes we release. Even better, the themes are all built to work together so that the content will work within any theme. This means you can switch the look of your site at any time, as many times as you want.

Coming in the next week or two, we will be releasing some new themes so stay tuned for the official releases!

Keep The Feature Requests Coming!

I would like to thank everyone who has signed up for trying us out early on and for giving us such great feedback along the way. We are always open to suggestions and will prioritize based on the kind of requests we get. So use the forum, or add a comment below and let us know what we could add to make the BlogSites even better.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature called Instant Preview. On the surface, it is a simple addition to their still fairly new feature , Google Instant. For anyone who hasn’t noticed this yet, Google now presents search results as you type, guessing ahead about what your going to type and showing results on the fly.

They have also added map results to the equation. If you are searching for something location based the first half of the page is taken up by map listings, which are taken from Google Places. If you own a business and have not yet listed yourself there, follow the link and do so immediately. No really. Stop reading and go add yourself to Places, then come back.

Anyway… Back to the latest change, Instant Preview.

What is Instant Preview?

Instant Preview adds a screenshot of every site to the search results. You do not even have to leave the page to see every website in the results.

Look at the search results and you will see a small magnifying glass icon.

When you click on that magnifying glass, you get a visual preview of the website.

Why it Matters

Think about the audience searching for a photographer. If I am searching for a photographer, I can complete a search and instantly get a glimpse of all the results without even clicking over to the site itself.

Here is where it gets interesting…

Any site based in Flash, any element of a site based in Flash is hidden by a grey box.

Like this…

Identity of the websites has been obscured to protect the innocent

Here is a site with partial Flash like a Flash header…

How does this effect me?

First, do a search where you know you will show up. Just search for your site. What does it look like? If your current site is in Flash, you will find that grey box. Now do a search that you want to rank well in and see what your competitors look like.

Now imagine a potential client searching and quickly looking at results page. It is now possible to very quickly judge a site based on these previews. Are you one of the sites that looks like a grey box or can I quickly see some of your images? Can I see a broken site or a nicely designed site that focuses on your images?

PhotographyBlogSites in Instant Preview

As you might have guessed, the point of this little article is that our sites are 100% HTML so they look exactly the way you want them to in this new feature.

Here are some examples…

Be Seen

Search results have always been about getting found. Being seen. Now more than ever, is your site visible to search engines? To mobile phones? To iPhone and iPad? Most importantly, is your site viewable to as wide an audience, to as many potential clients as possible?

Early in 2009, we sat down to discuss a more efficient way for photographers to display their work online. We had been working with photographers, and discussed the idea of an all-in-one blogsite that looks and feels like a flash site, with all the SEO benefits of a WordPress Blog. We made our wish list; social media integration, customization, easy-to-use backend, unlimited galleries, integration of fantastic photography tools like ShootQ, etc, etc. After developing many, many custom blogsites, we saw our theories in action and set out to develop Photography Blogsites.  Affordable, Easy-to-use, WordPress Portfolio Websites for Photographers.

We are offering an introductory lifetime membership for $499. That includes our search engine optimized blogsite, any new themes, 4 GB of hosting, our support, maintenance, upgrades and much, much more. For a full list of features visit our features section. No recurring costs…ever! But act fast! The offer will expire 11:59 PM on November 30, 2010. Extended until March 31, 2011!

Sign up for your free 7-day trial 14-day trial, and purchase your Lifetime Membership in your Blog Account area under the Dashboard. This is a limited time offer. See Terms and Conditions for full details.

We’d love to hear your thoughts as we will keep developing our sites to be the best they can be. As always, thank you so much for your support!