Regarding"Photography Blogsites"

royabramson · August 28, 2011

Hi
Is anyone here using this service? I am new to wordpress but I saw that it can be integrated with Smugmug, however I am not so sure about them (Photography blogsites) because I haven't heard much about them. My main concern is their theme design- I thought wordpress was endless but they photo blogsites only offers a few themes, plus I cannot figure out if widgets can be used. Can someone give me a word of advice? I would love to build my site ASAP but I am a bit lost with all the options
Thanking you in advace
Roy

schmoo · August 28, 2011

Hi Roy! I think I just shot you an email related to this topic.

Since we partnered with them I have used them to build my portfolio site and transferred my blog and domain over there. If you don't love their themes then you can style using your own CSS, although you will need to contact their support staff to find out how it's done. Feel free to check out their showcase of other photographers who use them, too.

What I love is that I don't have to be a CSS or a WP guru but there are tons of things that I can customize easily, either by uploading my own images or background, changing text, colors or by hiding/displaying features.

Their mission is to make your life easier and the whole thing is ready-to-go as soon as you create an account. They also want you to not have to get a headache worrying about self-hosting or managing everything, so while your account does include lots of different tools and widgets, I don't believe that you can install your own. But of course, feel free to ask them.

http://photographyblogsites.com/faq/

... and I do believe they have a free trial that you can try too, if you want to give it a whirl.

HTH!

martythornley · August 29, 2011

Hi Roy,
This is Marty Thornley, co-founder and lead developer at Photography BlogSites.

I believe I have been answering a few of your questions in email and on our support site today. So hi again!

While the name Photography BlogSites is still getting out there in the community at large, we have been around a while. We grew out of a company called Identity Kitchen, which you can find mentioned in forums like theBSchool and Digital Wedding Forum. Identity Kitchen focused on branding and identity as well as fully custom websites for photographers.

You can also see a good sample of reactions on twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/photoblogsites/favorites

We took our experience building those sites to develop Photography BlogSites because we found ourselves turning away people who were not quite ready for a fully custom site. We found it difficult to do this because there was no good HTML based website solution out there. People were turning to a flash site with a separate blog - everything we try to tell people not to do.

So Photography BlogSites was built. We started with 3 themes - Latte, CuppaJoe, and Espresso. We then built Macchiato and finally Cappuccino, with each one getting more and more customizable.

While the number of themes seems limited, the number of options combined with a little Custom CSS can turn your site into just about anything.

For example, this is our demo for Cappuccino:
http://cappuccino.photographyblogsites.com

And this is a customized site based on that theme:
http://upfromunder.com

And this is a user's site that was set up by the user themselves, using Macchiato and only the options provided:
http://katharinelandmeier.com/

This is our demo for Macchiato:
http://macchiato.photographyblogsites.com

And this is a user's site that was set up by the user themselves, using Macchiato and only the options provided:
http://baileyaro.com/

Hope that helps!

And thanks for the kind words @Schmoo!

royabramson · August 29, 2011

Thanks for the help!
I am checking to see if I am up to WP.
I wish you great success- I am sure this will appeal to many different people-especially the lifetime plan!
Roy

rokzmom · November 12, 2011

Alright, Smugmug! Thanks to your affiliation with Photography Blogsites, I have decided to stay with smugmug.

I started shopping around a bit for a "slicker" looking website, with wordpress capabilities. I love the fact that there are no limits to the number of photos I can upload with SMugmug, and was hesitant to lose the SEO status that I've built over the past few years, and this integration gives me the best of both worlds.

Thank you!

muse · April 8, 2012

I have just purchased and personalized my new photography blogsites page and I LOVE so much of what it can offer except that I can't seem to figure out how to take advantage of some of those offerings.

My big OOPS is that I should have figured out all of the bugs before I "went live" (or whatever that terminology is). Foolishly, I didn't debug and now I have a few things that don't work so hot and I need some serious help before too much time elapses.

Here are my 2 beefs:

#1a: When I go to my site, www.meganmusephotography.com, and click on "client galleries", I would like for "client galleries" to be linked directly to the client galleries page on my smugmug site. I can't figure out how to do that so for now I just have a link to the smugmug page which is silly.

#1b: When you click on the link I've created, it takes you to the linked page where you can see all the galleries (yay so far), but when you click on an actual gallery, it takes you back to my Photography Blogsites webpage where it says "We couldn't find that page".

#2: I've tried multiple times to create overlay galleries on my portfolio page. At first they all showed up. Then, I realized they needed some rearranging in smugmug and switched a few things around. I went back to "edit page" and re-entered the link to the new gallery and it completely lost it. Now nothing shows up except a small placeholder that says "portfolio".

I've put in a request to Marty Thornley already and he's gotten back to me regarding how to test #2 to see where the problem lies but there is still no resolution and I'm anxious to get it running.

Thanks in advance!

Megan

martythornley · April 9, 2012

Hi Megan,

Thanks for the nice mention! I'm happy to hear you are having a good experience with the site so far. All of these sound like easy enough fixes and most of it is on our end except for the domain issue mentioned below...

For that link to your SmugMug page, right now you have that link inside a page but you can look under "BlogSite Options->Connections->Custom Links" and add any link you want into the menu.

The broken links mentioned in 1B is because it looks like you have your domain set somewhere is your smugmug settings but that domain is now pointing to your BlogSite. So those are being generated by SmugMug to look like this:
http://www.meganmusephotography.com/ClientGalleries/Boudoir-Bachelorette/18259609_bZGnQ5

When really they should look something like this:
http://meganmusephotography.smugmug.com/ClientGalleries/Boudoir-Bachelorette/18259609_bZGnQ5

That sounds like something a support hero could help with?

I think we have a support ticket for #2 and, as far as I can tell the gallery info gets mixed up when the name changes within SmugMug. Still looking into why and if we can do something better. If anyone there at SmugMug has any ideas, let us know.

muse · April 10, 2012

The direct link works great now. Thanks Marty!

I'll repost a new ticket for the other.

rokzmom · September 14, 2016

Hey Marty,
I'm not getting any response from you through Photography Blogsites support, although you have been assigned to my support request for 5 days now. Thought I would see if I could get a hold of you through this forum.

It is regarding Request #3218. The drop down menus are not working on my site. If I can not get support for your service I will be cancelling my subscription prior to its renewal in November.

Regarding"Photography Blogsites"

Comments