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.