It’s that time of year again, and we can wait to see everyone at WPPI! We’ll be at Launch Pad and making appearances and doing giveaways with some of our very favorite friends and partners.

The best news is that we’ll be bringing back our Lifetime Deal. That’s $499 for life with no recurring charges EVER! This is an in-person deal ONLY, so check the list and come and find us. Or please just stop by and say hi!

Sunday, February 19 from 9am-12pm: Kay Eskridge’s: Bold and Beautiful Platform Class (Sponsored Event)*

Join Kay and learn to balance a family-friendly business with the art of boudoir photography; place appropriate value on what you offer; market this exciting new photography trend; create unique product lines; and about a community outreach program that will set you apart from your competition. *We’ll be doing a grand prize give-away (worth almost $1,400) of a Lifetime Membership (worth $499), Premium White Glove (worth $599), a Couture SnapShot (worth $299), and on top of that a FREE T-Shirt! (priceless)

Sunday, February 19 from 2-5pm: Launch Pad. Come meet us there! We’ll have a table where we’ll have information about our products. Have a bite to eat, or just stop by to say hello. This is a good place to find us for those Lifetime Memberships.

Monday, February 20th at 2:00pm: SmugMug Booths #1528/1529. We’ll be doing a Product Demonstration of how our fabulous SmugMug integration works with our BlogSites and talking about how to create a better more cohesive web presence. The best part, we’ll also be giving away a Lifetime Membership! (worth $499)

Last but not least, come find us at the SnapKnot Booth #1132. Date TBA. We’ll be giving away another Lifetime Membership. (worth $499)

WordPress has two built-in privacy settings that allow you to make sure your site is shown to or hidden from search engines. But wouldn’t it be great to be able to hide your site while you work on it? Or maybe create a private, password protected site?

We’ve just added four new levels or privacy and visibility that allow you to choose how your site is seen.

You can now:

1. Allow everyone, including search engines.
2. Allow normal visitors but block search engines.
3. Allow only logged in users of the entire PhotographyBlogSites network.
4. Allow only users registered to your site.
5. And even block everyone but admin level users of your site – that’s just you!
6. Or… Provide a password that protects the whole site!

How to use it:

What can you do with this?

This sounds like a small new feature at first but allows you much more control over your site.

Some ideas for how you might use it:

1. Create a password protected site for your boudoir business.
2. Make it only accessible to you while you work on design or content changes. This could be a great idea when your free trial has ended and you have activated a subscription but are not quite ready to le the world see your work in progress.
3. By requiring logged in users of your site, you could make sure people register as members and create a member only site. Great for email marketing!

This post started as a response to an email we received recently. A potential new client was considering our sites and wanted to know how our sites worked with email, ftp, file sharing, and other things that might or might not be included in a traditional hosting account.

How our “Hosted” sites work

First, I should explain how our sites work because people who have owned a hosting account are used to things working a little differently.

While we “host” the BlogSite we are not a “hosting provider”. We provide premium managed hosting of a WordPress site – handling daily backups, seamless upgrades, and development of new features.

We work similar to the way someone like SmugMug or AlbumExposure or Basecamp or DropBox, or any “hosted” web app does – we host that one thing and do it extremely well, better than would ever be possible to sell as a one-off site. Basically it is WordPress as a Service and even more specifically as a service for Photographers.

Simply put,  our websites for photographers are a little different from the rest.

Email

While we do not host email, you can definitely get email at your domain – in fact we encourage it and help point out solutions for that. Google Apps for business (not gmail but works like it ) is awesome. It works just like gmail and has the best spam protection around. It even has a free version that provides up to 50 emails at your domain for free.

Everyone should own a domain and everyone should have email at that domain. It is a very inexpensive way (around $10/year) to look more professional and provide brand recognition online. info@myphotostudio.com just sounds much better than myname@hotmail.com.

FTP Access and File Sharing

“FTP” stands for “File Transfer Protocol”. It is a tool used to upload and download files straight to a server. Many people are used to using this method with a hosting account in order to share slideshows, pricing guides, images, movies, and anything else. We do not provide any type of FTP access with our sites, but that should not limit the ability to share files with clients in anyway.

Even if we did provide FTP access, we would not recommend using FTP for sharing files from your server anyway. In fact, the terms of most hosting accounts explicitly prohibit that. They may never catch on or do anything about it but it is generally against hosting terms. If that is not enough reason to not do it, how about some good reasons to use other tools? There are some great file sharing services out there like DropBox and You Send It that provide better encryption, security and privacy in addition to faster upload and download times for your clients. The free version of DropBox is often enough for that at 2GB.

Premium Support

We also support our sites with detailed documentation, tutorial videos, email, live chat and a support ticket system that allows us to prioritize and assign everything that we need to address with the sites. But there are lots of places that would describe their support systems that way.

The biggest thing that makes our support a step better is that all of our sites use a networked version of WordPress, where all sites share the same software. When we add a new feature or make an upgrade is gets added for everyone instantly. This also means that when a bug is found, it gets fixed for everyone. Since we first started developing the BlogSites, thousands of users have been testing every aspect of the sites.

Because we have thousands of eyes looking at the sites and can fix things for all users at once, it allows us to provide a level of support that is simply not possible with one-at-a-time sites. We know this because we were building custom one-off sites for several years and it gets very difficult to maintain separate sites.

A word about pricing

A shared hosting account can be found for as little as $5/month. But you essentially get an empty box and you need to create the website: maybe install WordPress (or another CMS), find a theme and add that, add plugins, tweak settings… and so on. And even after all that… How is your site being backed up? Do you need to hire someone to help upgrade WordPress several times a year? Are the settings optimized for SEO? Does your site have built-in caching so that it loads as fast as possible? And on the simplest level – do you have an on call support team that can answer questions any day of the week? Or did you use a WordPress theme that is just a blog, so you still need something to be a portfolio site?

For people that know a little programming, some of those things may not factor in, but when you really consider all that we are providing, I can guarantee you we are one of the lowest price options out there for a full portfolio site, blog, hosting and the level of support we provide.

The coming months will bring some new features and ideas that we are very excited about and want to give a quick preview of what to expect. For most of these, we will be looking for early feedback so if you are interested in trying out some new toys and helping guide the development of the sites, let us know!

Couture SnapShots!

The new Couture SnapShots will provide BlogSite owners premium designs that “snap” into place. They will come with easy to activate settings that bring a new look to your site and will even include layered Photoshop files, allowing further customization. All of our BlogSite themes are extremely customizable but these new design starting points will help you take your site to the next level.

WordPress Plugins for Everyone!

We have been able to build a lot of great tools for the photographers and creative professionals using our sites. They have been tested by our users for over two years now. But most of the tools built within our system have only been available to our hosted sites.
Starting in February, we will start making plugins available to everyone. Some will be free. Some will be premium (paid) plugins that will be available in our new Marketplace. All will be tools built for photographers, based on feedback and years of working with photographers.

Marketplace!

The Couture SnapShots and plugins and more will all be made available in a new Marketplace, to be launched soon. We have been planning and building this behind the scenes and are looking forward to starting a whole new way to help creative professionals create a better online presence.

Special Discount – 1/2 off Additional Sites!

Have ever wanted to start a 2nd or third arm of your business? Boudoir, commercial, a new product line, workshops? We want to make it really easy to take that leap. If you have at least one site that is currently paid, you can get any number of additional sites at 1/2 price. All you need to do is create a new site while logged in under your same username. When you visit the Blog Account page, all prices will marked down.

Yes, you heard that right. 50% off! ANYTIME.

And to make things even easier, we are happy to announce a very cool new feature that we are calling “SnapShots”. If you want to keep a similar look and keep some brand recognition on your other sites, you can use our new SnapShot tool to save, export and import style settings between sites. By simply copying and pasting your exported settings, you can spin-off a second site with the same exact look!

What are SnapShots?

On the most basic level, SnapShots allow you to save your site’s style settings. This means you can save a look, change it and go back to a SnapShot at any time. You can create multiple looks for time of year, holidays, or any other reason then save them and switch between them at any point. You can experiment with new looks for your site and go back to any one of them if you don’t like what you came up with.

Consistent Branding Across Sites

You can also export your settings and start a second site with the EXACT look of the first site. Imagine starting a new portrait or boudoir business that you want to have a separate site for. Using a SnapShot of your main site, you can instantly keep the branding consistent. And if you ever change the design, you can just export and update the second site in seconds.

But Wait, there’s more!

Over the coming weeks, we will be releasing our own SnapShots to the entire Photography BlogSites community, available for free. For new users, these will be great starting points for your site. For current users, it will be like we just released a whole bunch of new themes.

Each SnapShot includes the theme it was built on. We will have SnapShots based on all of our themes, adding new color schemes, moving page layouts and more. You won’t need to worry about which theme you use or which theme the snapshot is based on. When you select a SnapShot, the site automatically changes the theme.

Themes Unlimited

As we release new SnapShots, the idea of “themes” will start to become less important. In some ways, we could develop one theme and build snapshots that do everything we need for a new look or feel. In the end, that is the important part – can you create a personalized site that is customized to fit your brand? With SnapShots, we will be able to very quickly develop new looks for you and expand the possibilities like never before.