Now In Beta: PhotoShelter’s New Platform For Your Portfolio Website

Now In Beta: PhotoShelter’s New Platform For Your Portfolio Website

We’ve been cooking up something really exciting here at PhotoShelter, and today, the project takes a big step forward. We’re kicking off the private Beta release for our new platform for portfolio websites.

For the past few months, we’ve been testing this new platform – and our initial portfolio designs – with a small group of photographers, and now we’re opening it up to a larger population.

Our new designs are a pretty radical change from our current website options. They are modern and bold, and tap into emerging user interface paradigms to give you more powerful and engaging ways to showcase your work. They incorporate responsive design and HTML5 so they’ll optimize for various screen sizes and devices, including tablets, and give you a range of customization options you’ve never had before with PhotoShelter, like much greater control over fonts, colors, and custom pages. Making changes and updates is super easy and intended to save you time with a “live edit” tool – i.e. the ability to see your edits as you make them and save/push live what you like, as you go along.

Example of one of the new portfolio websites/robinmoore.photoshelter.com

The All Galleries page/robinmoore.photoshelter.com

An example of a second new template/www.inger.net

The new portfolio sites include Vimeo integration/www.inger.net

Going beyond the advanced design, the big differentiator for our portfolio websites will be the way they integrate with the rest of the tools packed inside each PhotoShelter account. Nowhere else will you be able to combine high-end portfolio designs with the power of your entire image archive in one seamless, elegant experience for your clients and prospects, including your image sales, client proofing, image delivery, and downloads.

But that’s not all. In fact, it’s really just the starting point. The portfolio sites sit atop a new API-based platform that will allow us to be agile and stay on top of the latest advancements in technology and design – and make it available to you. So, in essence, you continue to store and manage your photos in the same way on PhotoShelter, and we will continuously add new features and design templates more rapidly than we’ve ever done before. Personally, I’m excited about the flexibility that this new platform will give us to expand what you can do with your photos online in entirely new and imaginative ways.

So what’s next?

Everything we do supports our mission to help photographers succeed as business owners. In order to do that, we need to take advantage of the latest technology. And we need to provide a modern website experience that meets your audience’s expectations. Rather – an experience that blows away your audience. This new platform is our first step in that direction.

It’s a big, forward-looking step for PhotoShelter. It’s taken a lot of time and focus for our team, and I’m proud of how far we’ve come. I can promise there is much more to come – a public Beta will soon follow this next private phase.

As always, user feedback is a critical part of our product development process.  So, we invite you to sign up for the Beta if you’re interested in being an early tester and are willing to tell us what you think (the good, bad and ugly). We’ll be bringing on testers in waves over the next 6-8 weeks to help us further refine the templates we’ve built thus far and gather ideas for upcoming designs. In the meantime, you can  find answers to more detailed questions on the whole process here.

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This article was written by

PhotoShelter CEO. Follow on Twitter: @awfingerman and Instagram: @awfinger

There are 23 comments for this article
  1. Jay at 6:35 pm

    Well done. And not a moment too soon 🙂 I’ve been looking around for better ways to showcase my portfolio – seems consumer services like 500px and the new flickr were moving to more responsive designs for our devices, so I really like what I am seeing here.

  2. Pingback: Photoshelter’s new platform for your portfolio website – Beta Release » Yew Kwang Photography Blog
  3. Kristjan Logason at 11:55 am

    As spoken out of my dreams. My weekend plan was to dive into the dark side of responcive web design and see if I could upgrade my site. Guess you saved me from the dark side 🙂

    Good job once again!

  4. Tamara Gentuso at 11:56 am

    I do not do a lot of sales of images through my site but rather have found that the online portfolio which PhotoShelter hosts has driven serious work my way. I’ve shot for a number of big name companies in the last couple of years, and each one found their way to me via my online portfolio on PhotoShelter.

    YES, please sign me up for beta testing of portfolio sites!!

  5. Tim Anderson at 12:08 pm

    Very cool! I have been kind of waiting (is that an excuse?) for something like this to jump-start my site revision. Good luck to all at PS for getting this ready. Way to go!

  6. Steve at 12:15 pm

    Wow, looks great. Love the full screen look. I generally hate spending time tweaking web site design – but this has me super excited to do a redesign!

  7. Lindsey at 12:52 pm

    I am excited about this. I just redid my logo and will be starting on my site soon. I was actually looking for someone new to possibly host my site. May just stick around now…

  8. Rab at 1:06 pm

    This just saved my relationship with Photoshelter. I’m not going to lie. My existing PS site is very SEO friendly but clunky and lacking soul. These new portfolios will keep me on board.

  9. Karen Joslin at 2:05 pm

    I recently redesigned my site with a manual customization, but I love the increased functionality the new templates will bring, especially the integrated blog and Vimeo feed. Here’s the top thing I’d really like to see: the ability to mark certain images in a gallery to appear in a portfolio, while the other images can remain in the same gallery but not appear in the portfolio. Most people looking at a portfolio only want to see a small number of top images in that category, no duplication of subjects, etc. Currently, if you want to license images/sell products for additional shots that you don’t want in that portfolio, then you have to create two separate galleries with similar names. It’s confusing and redundant.

  10. Janice Sullivan at 2:11 pm

    I am so excited to read this. I’ve been looking for a site that will show my images in full frame within computers, tablets, etc… From what I see above it looks like we will be able to have this capability 🙂

  11. Thomas at 6:15 pm

    Wow, this just comes at the right moment. I’m setting up my page just these days and try to chose the right design and along came this. Seems I’ll havea whole bunch of new possiblities 🙂

  12. superf at 6:40 pm

    man i hope my site will work on ipad/iphone… i’m dyin ovah heah — embarrassing! (my stats show that the last 100 people all viewed my site on ipad/iphone — meaning NONE could see my galleries!)

    anyway good to see a bit of effort, especially on the day 500px launches its new portfolio templates.

    it would be easier to stick with the kind folks over at photoshelter. I suggest lots of workflow advice and userability tests, given all the non-intuitive, albeit inventive, designs and instructions your team seems to favor.

    Cheers.

    i suggest you

  13. Jay at 12:51 am

    I saw this in the FAQ

    >You’re eager to redesign your website (either now or within the next 2-­3 months

    Yep, been running a demo of SquareSpace (very good) and the new 500px portfolios (not so good, I get crashes on the iPad). I want to make a final decision on portfolio site soon, so have signed up for the Beta

  14. Mark Martin at 3:49 am

    Long overdue. I was with you folks from the very beginning. The last year has been nothing but a sheer donation to your cause. Bailed in March, earn my business back will ya?

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