Two New Templates: East & Downtown
This week we’re so excited to introduce two newly designed and completely responsive Beam website templates: East and Downtown. Both were designed with member feedback and requests in mind, giving you elegant new ways to display your work and let your visitors navigate your site with ease. Members, if you’ve been waiting to dive into Beam, we know you’ll find your perfect match with our now seven HTML5 templates to choose from. Below we take a closer look at these new options and their specific features.
East
East has a simple and beautifully clean layout that will give your site’s visitors a taste of what you do quickly and elegantly. This new template displays filterable thumbnails on its homepage so viewers can immediately scan your work and get a clear idea of your portfolio worthy shots. Also, the navigation bar keeps your business name and contact information locked in your site’s header, so your branding will be persistent no matter how far your visitors scroll. Explore a live East demo site, here.
Downtown
Downtown’s homepage will make a big impression on your site’s visitors with its single image full screen display. As visitors dig deeper, they’ll be delighted to find a super organized high level view of your portfolio with extra-large cover images and a format that’ll work great whether you choose to feature lots of galleries or just a few. Explore a live Downtown demo site, here.
Ready to try out these new templates? If you’re not a member yet, sign up for our 14-day free trial today! Members, you can go straight to your Site Builder to explore these new options.
Beautiful new templates. I’ve switched my site to the Downtown template, but I just discovered that it is not working properly using safari (Version 5.1.10) It renders beautifully on Firefox. Anybody else have this problem, or experience with how it looks on I.E. or Chrome?
Hi Cornelis – someone from our Client Services team should be in touch with you!
Hi Cornelis. Safari 5.1.10 is quite old in Internet Time, and sounds like the Windows version. If so, it’s worth remembering Apple have put development of the Windows variant on the back burner. The Mac version is now at 7.1, and both templates work perfectly in this version.
Thanks, Clive. I’m having the same problem in Safari 6.0.5, which is one version older than the latest that shipped with Maverick. I believe that photoshelter will support the latest two versions, so Safari 6 should be okay, but it is not working.
I like both new templates. Is there options to add custom pages like a Services page or blog?
Cody, yes! Please take a look at our Support page that explains how to add custom pages and integrate a Tumblr blog via your Site’s Navigation: https://support.photoshelter.com/entries/21985975-Responsive-Beam-Templates-FAQ#editingyournav
I like East a lot but when I tried it yesterday my logo looked small, too small compared to Element, so I reverted back. These little things are important from a photographer’s brand perspective. I hope Photoshelter can have a look at the issue. Thanks.
Carlos – Thanks for your feedback. Each template has a different specifications for logos. The element logo is indeed larger than the East template.
I like Beam and the themes. One think I can’t find out is how to show the collections with for example the Downtown-theme. I have some galleries that I like to keep in a collection.
I love the new templates and I’m thinking about switching to the ‘East’ template. My only conner is that when viewing a photo there’s no way to to view the title of the image. Am I missing something or is that on purpose?
Let me know.
Hi Adam – thanks! We’re happy to say that both of the new templates will allow you to display image info in the single image portfolio view. While in edit mode (with the Site Builder open), you’ll just navigate to the single image view and click the pencil icon labeled “Image Viewer Settings” (upon hover). There you’ll find the option to turn the image info “on”, you will see your image description or title (depending on what you have in your metadata) display beneath the image right away.
Thanks Sarah!
I have a strange problem with Downtown, the theme I want to use.
On a item page in a gallery, with any browser on my Mac (OS 10.9.5, the latest versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox) you can’t scroll down to see all the text and keywords. It just cuts the field, and text can be only half letters.
(see screenhot: http://basfotografie.com/ps_error.png )
And if you select ‘less info’ first and switch back to ‘more info’, some of the text is hidden behind the photo. By refresh it’s working again.
Hi Bas, thank you for this note! This issue has now been fixed. Please contact our Support Team if you have anymore questions for concerns! Support@photoshelter.com
Thanks for solving it!
It would be great if you had a template that was less portfolio based and better for selling prints-one that didn’t have to be customized.
I have some feedback and feature requests for two themes.
BALANCE
I would like to be able to display a simple caption beneath selected photos in my main galleries. This is especially useful for portraits. As it stands I think I have to display two sets of meta data, caption and file name. That would be ok for an image library but for a front end online photo folio it needs to be really slick.
I would also like to set my site up so that visitors land on the grid view of galleries rather than a featured image. I think this would be a really useful feature and one offered by other web solutions i.e. neon sky etc
Which leads me to East
EAST
When I saw the email for East I was absolutely delighted, an over view gallery with a set of other featured galleried beneath and, per my point visitors land on a grid rather than a simple image. This would be brilliant but displaying randomly selected pictures from featured galleries makes no sense, I’m sure others might agree, not every image is a key image in a featured gallery or photo story.
If the Overview gallery was optional or if it could be manually created with precisely the images I wanted to show I think you’d be onto a real winner with the template.
I think simple captions would be a great option of this theme too though I confess I haven’t explored it fully as it won’t allow me to configure the overview gallery manually.
I really hope you can add this functionality, I think for many photographers these would be very useful features.
I’m sorry, I meant Element not Balance. If you delete my post I’ll rewrite it.
The East template is buggy in latest Safari or iOS 7. Thumbnails are not loading consistently – I am forced to reload the page or click the gallery link in the navigation to see all the thumbnails every time. When this occurs space is left for the missing thumbs, but they do not appear. Not a problem in Chrome, and have not tested in Safari. Great template but this is kinda a deal breaker if it can’t be resolved…
I also agree that it would be nice to have the option to display captions in the portfolio. Now it’s only possible to display filenames, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to display that info in their portfolio.
Hi Chris, thanks for your notes. The thumbnail issue in Safari has now been fixed!
When viewers click on the link to the album from their PCs they cannot see the images. The page is simply blank under the header. Please help!
Hi, I’ve wanted to change to Beam for months but whenever I try it, there is stuff that doesn’t work. I like Downtown, but I only see up to 250 images in a collection, where are the others?
The search page feature doesn’t work.
The contact email page doesn’t work.
I now want to switch back to Classic.
How do I do that, it’s not clear.
Hi Tim, thanks for the notes! There is indeed a cap for 250 images per gallery – this limit exists to ensure that your site loads in an optimal manner. To work around this limit, you may want to parse images from your portfolio galleries, into multiple galleries, and feature those galleries in your portfolio. Of course, you’ll just want to keep that 250 image limit in mind!
As for contact/search pages behaving a bit odd, this could be due to a unsupported browser. Please contact our awesome Support Team at support@photoshelter.com with your questions to get that straightened out, and they can also walk you through switching back to Classic.
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for the feedback. So there is a limit of 250 images per gallery and I need to make additional galleries in order to add more images. If, for example I want to add 4000 images to a gallery, this is not a very practical solution and my clients will not want to search numerous galleries. In Classic I can add as many images as needed to a gallery, so I don’t want to take a backward step in Beam and reduce the availability of images to my clients. Are all galleries in Beam, whatever design, limited to 250 images?
Hey Tim,
Chris Owyoung from PhotoShelter’s product team here. I wanted to chime in here with a little bit of clarification. Beam is designed to be a portfolio website solution with “portfolio” defined in the traditional sense as, “a highly curated selection of an artist’s best work.” In practice, the 250 image limit only applies to those galleries you’re featuring in your portfolio. The limit does not apply to normal galleries (that you would use for stock sales, client delivery, etc.) in your archive.
We realize that a modern, fast and responsive portfolio website solution is of great value to editorial, commercial and wedding photographers but that it’s of far less value for photographers who are primarily using PhotoShelter as a transactional storefront (sales, proofing and delivery-only). To that end, we’re currently working on a modern gallery solution that will better suit those workflows. You’ll be seeing the first pieces of this project over the next few months.
Hi Chris,
I appreciate your reply. If I have my individual photographers hat on everything would appear to be good and I can just about understand the 250 limit. But if I want to sell stock I need a lot of images on there. Are the normal galleries available in Beam yet or is this the element you are working on? What is surprising is that the Classic galleries don’t have this limitation yet the new improved galleries in Beam do! I’ll look forward to the update. Thanks Tim
Sarah, Downtown is buggy with Safari 8 in Yosemite. Despite whatever I type for the logo I get an uppercase result. If I change the template to Element I get the correct display for whatever I type, please get this sorted ASAP, I only have a few days of the trial left and cannot continue with the site building if I cant even get the logo to display correctly. I don’t want to use other templates
thanks
best
Simon