We asked one of our clickbooq photographers to tell us what it was like being on the campaign trail. Lonnie C. Major (http://www.lcmphoto.com), who shot the cover of the January issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine, describes the three days he followed Senator Barack Obama on the campaign trail in Des Moines, Iowa in January 2008.

“[Senator Barack] Obama really changed my whole view on the country and politics as a whole. I felt all the love that Iowa had in their heart for a man that I knew so little about at the time, leading up to what may be history in the making…. I remember in a town hall meeting, a lady stood up and said that her son was fighting in the war and she wanted her son to come home. Barack held the woman’s hand and looked into her eyes and told her if he’s president that he would end the war and bring the troops home safe.

The days following that speech I would have my moment with Senator Obama…. I knew I had to do two setups with him and had two locations in mind. I had to act really quickly and had to make sure that all my Canon 5D’s were all working…. When Senator Obama finally walked into the classroom [I had] transformed into a studio with studio lights and stands, I told him what kind of look I wanted from him. He smiled and told me he only had three looks and he gave me all three of his looks - a man true to his words. I had another setup in the college auto shop of him which was on the presidential blue background which we ran for the cover of Black Enterprise magazine.

In the middle of shooting he did stop to talk to my team and to explain his plans for changing the country for the better and creating jobs and bringing an end to the war. He also told us that this is what he always wanted to do, that you should always dream big and live your dream. Three days that I will always remember … [to] capture a man and his dream and his message to America.”

If you’re new to the interactive space, or just want to brush up on your web lingo, we’ll be defining some terms for you to help make sense of how the internet works.

Web Browser is the generic name for the software you use to view and navigate web page. The browser translates HTML code into what you see on your screen. Common browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari.

Domain names are the alphanumeric names for an address on the web, like clickbooq.com.

Domain TLD is the domain extension, such as .com, .net, .org, or .ca.

IP address is a dotted decimal number that represents a unique address to each machine on the Internet. IP stands for Internet Protocol.

Domain name servers (DNS) connect your domain name to the IP address. Every domain name must have a primary nameserver and at least one secondary nameserver - in case one of the nameservers is inaccessible. When you sign up for clickbooq, we ask if you already have a domain name registered. If you do, we give you simple instructions on how to change your domain name servers to ours. You’re not transferring your domain registration to us - it will stay at the same domain registrar - you’ll just be pointing your name servers to ours. We provide you with step-by-step instructions and our DNS server names and IP addresses (in case they can only accept IP addresses).

Domain Registrar is who you purchased your domain name from, such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, or enom, which is who we are a reseller of. You can register a domain name for a year or more. If you can’t remember where you purchased your domain name, you can check your domain info at http://www.whois.net/

Make sure to notify your domain registrar if you change your email address or other contact information. Otherwise you will not receive reminders when your domain name registration is up for renewal and you could lose access to your site and your domain.

Note: Beware of bogus emails from domain name registrars offering to renew your domain name for you - oftentimes these are scams that transfer your domain to a different registrar then charge excessive fees. You can read more about these scams here:

http://www.ucan.org/blog/blog/scam_alert/domain_registry_of_america_scam

Web Host: If you are a clickbooq client, we are your web host. We host your website on our dedicated servers (meaning only clickbooq websites are on our servers and not shared with other services).

Internet Service Provider (ISP) is the company that provides you with internet access. This is usually separate from your your web hosting provider or domain registrar - popular ISP’s are AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the electronic transfer of files to and from your web server. Your clickbooq account includes an FTP account where you can store up to 250 MBs of hi-res images, additional galleries, downloadable pdfs, etc. You’ll need an FTP client to upload files to your FTP account, like Fetch, CuteFTP, or cyberduck. With FTP you can upload PDF’s to your FTP account and link files like price sheets and brochures to your content pages.

How to Post Price Lists and Create Lightboxes with Easy to Remember URLs

Here’s a few tips for taking full advantage of your clickbooq FTP account.

To post a pricelist on your clickbooq website, or any downloadable file, you can upload the file to your FTP account and easily link to it within a Content Page on your site. To link to the files in your FTP account, use the following link syntax:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/yourfoldername/yourfilename.jpg

(of course you’ll put in your own domain name, folder name, and file name in the above example)

If you visit http://bobwillson.clickbooq.com/ and click on the “Download PDF” link in the left hand navigation menu, you’ll see how we’ve created a Content Page that allows users to download a pdf from our site.

One drawback to a flash portfolio website is your users won’t be able to bookmark specific images within your site. Because Flash websites are actually single Flash movie files that enclose your site’s entire content within them, there aren’t individual pages like with HTML-based site. This makes it difficult to link to a specific sections of a Flash-based website.

There is a method to get around this limitation which is called “stateful” or “deep” linking. We will be incorporating this functionality for all clickbooq websites in the near future. The one caveat is that links created with this method aren’t very clean or simple since they need to pass certain variables.

For example, the link may look something like this:

http://www.iamafashionphotographer.com/gb.html#/data/gb/GBtemplate.xml?aaa=data/gb/IDfashion.xml&bbb=data/gb/photos.xml

Not so pretty, right? But it’s currently the only way to enable such a feature.

So how do you send five cherry-picked images to a photo editor, without having them to hunt through your entire online portfolio? Create a Lightbox from any of the images in your image archive and send it to them. We’ve even got a workaround that will allow you to create a simple and easy to remember URL for your custom Lightbox.

First, create your Lightbox of the images you want, then email it to yourself so you have the link. Then, log into your clickbooq FTP directory and create a folder with the name of the link you want. For example, if you want your link to be www.iamafashionphotographer.com/vogue, you would create a directory called “vogue” (in your public_html directory).

Now, create a new plain text file and paste the following code into it:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://lightbox_url_goes_here”
//–>
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Replace the window.location URL above, with your Lightbox URL.
Save your text file as ‘index.php’ and upload it to your FTP account in the folder you just created.

Now when someone accesses that link, it will then read the .php file you uploaded and they will automatically be redirected to that Lightbox.

If you ever need to change the images in that Lightbox, simply send yourself a new Lightbox and change the URL in the index.php file to update it with the new Lightbox link.

Within the Support Center, download the “Using FTP Guide” for more information on how to use your FTP account.

Ready to jump on the blog bandwagon? clickbooq makes it oh-so-easy for you to add a blog to your clickbooq website. We’ll setup and install Wordpress for you in the folder name of your choice (for example, yourdomainname.com/myblog). Since the blog resides on your domain name, it’s a great way to drive search engine traffic back to your clickbooq website and helps with your search engine rankings.

To submit a request for a blog, click here.

Been a long-time blogger? Migrate your old Wordpress blog to your new clickbooq-hosted blog. For step-by-step instructions on migrating an existing blog, see the knowledge base article in clickbooq’s support area: Migrate your wordpress blog

Just what is Wordpress and what can you do with it? Wordpress is an open source, easy-to-use Blog software that comes packed with features. It’s also the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, allowing you to tap into a large and active community of users and support resources. You can find free downloadable Wordpress themes online or customize the look of your blog yourself to match your clickbooq website.

Some useful Wordpress links:

http://themes.wordpress.net/

http://www.solostream.com/

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes

Blogs can be a natural extension of your website, where you can upload select images from your latest photoshoots and keep your clients and friends up-to-date on what you’ve been working on or where you’ve been traveling to. Blogs are also a great marketing tool and help with word-of-mouth referrals. Wedding photographers often use blogs to post teaser images from recent weddings which inevitably get sent from brides to family and friends. And while you’ll still want to edit your images down to a select few, blogs give you a little more freedom to post quirky or artistic shots you might not have included on your portfolio website.

We’re looking forward to reading your new photography blogs! Send us a link to your blog and we’ll check it out, plus if you add clickbooq’s blog to your blogroll, we’ll link to your blog, too!

clickbooq is one of the sponsors for WedComp ‘08, an international wedding image competition open to all wedding photographers. Leading wedding photographers Susan Stripling, Brooks Whittington, Garrett and Joy Nudd, and David Beckstead are judging the competition. The overall winning image will receive a free annual subscription to clickbooq plus a $1,000 cash prize.

WedComp is giving away contest entry credits to photographers who blog about the contest and link back to WedComp’s site. For more information about entering the competition and category prizes, visit http://wedcomp.com.

When using Adobe Photoshop’s Save for Web feature, you may have noticed a shift in color or a reduction in contrast from your originals. This change is due to the fact that Photoshop is a color-managed application and the Web is not. When you utilize Save for Web, the color profile saved to your image in Photoshop is stripped out so the image is not color managed when viewed in your Internet browser.

There are a few simple steps you can take to minimize color shifting:

1. Open image in Photoshop.
2. Change Photoshop’s color management settings by selecting Color Settings from the Edit menu.
3. From the Color Setting window, choose sRGB from the drop-down menu and click OK. Note: Change your color setting back to Adobe RGB (1998) when you are doing work for print which requires the larger color space.
4. Select Image >Adjustments >Hue/Saturation. Images tend to look washed out or desaturated when using Save for Web. We recommend adjusting the saturation level to somewhere between +10 to +12 to compensate for this.
5. Click OK.
6. With these adjustments, export your image using Save for Web as normal.

Taking these few steps can help you reduce image desaturation and loss of color plus yield the smaller file sizes better suited for the web.

So you’ve finished building your new clickbooq portfolio website and are ready for launch. How can you make the most of your new website launch? Here’s a few pointers to drive traffic to your new website:

1. If you haven’t done so before, submit your website to directories so you can get some inbound links to your website. Check any professional organizations you belong to, your local Chamber of Commerce, online yellow pages, and photographer associations and ask to be added to their list of links. This helps contributes to your site’s search engine rankings and visibility. Submit your site to the major search engines if your site has not been indexed before. Within your Toolbox, you’ll find a link for submitting your site to Google. Also, submit your photography studio to Google Local, which will help people find you locally.
   These steps will help people find your site through organic searches, however you may also consider running a Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions campaign to drive paid search engine traffic to your new website.
2. Send out a promo email to your network to get the word out. Just make sure you only send emails to people who have opted-in to receive information from you. Sending out unwanted emails could get your email address or domain blacklisted.If you decide to purchase a mailing list, one highly qualified list provider for reaching agencies and art buyers is ADBASE (http://www.adbase.com/). An excellent way to send out a professional HTML email is by using MailChimp’s email marketing services. You can easily import your customer lists and Mailchimp will manage any unsubscribes or email bounces – an excellent indicator of how current your contact information is. Then create a beautiful eye-catching email incorporating the look & feel of your website using Mailchimp’s email templates. Once your promo email has been sent, you can track how many people opened your email, forwarded it to a friend, or clicked links. At just .03 an email, this is an affordable and timely way to spread the news about your new website launch. As a clickbooq customer, you can sign up for a free Mailchimp trial account and get $60 in free email credits.
3. Update all your business collateral and advertising materials with your new web address. This may include your business cards, brochures, price lists, faxes, invoices, and any direct mail pieces. Add a Signature to your outgoing emails that includes your studio’s website URL.

Once you’ve completed these steps, check your Google Analytics account to check your site stats. Did you see an uptick in site traffic? How long are people staying on your website? Where are they coming from? These stats will help you prepare for your next email campaign or site redesign.

While it has been quiet on the clickbooq blog front, it is not for lack of activity. This past month we’ve been hard at work tweaking clickbooq’s Toolbox – where you build and manage your website – and your front-end flash website. We’ve listened to your feedback and requests to introduce new features and enhance the visitor experience across all of our portfolio websites.

Different visitors have different objectives and surfing habits. That’s why we’ve added click-to-advance on your portfolio images. Now users can browse images by clicking on the portfolio image, using the previous / next buttons, or selecting Slideshow mode.

Plus portfolios now loop back to the beginning, instead of ending on the last image in a portfolio. We’ve removed the transition delay at the start of a Slideshow so once initiated, slideshows play immediately. And when visitors use the Lightbox feature to send custom galleries from your website, we’ve improved the email deliverability, decreasing the likelihood of Lightbox emails being classified as spam.

By popular demand, we’ve added FTP accounts for all users. You’ll have access to 250 MBs of FTP storage space to share your high-res images and post PDF files. You can also use FTP to post simple HTML-based Web Galleries you’ve exported from Photoshop - although the Lightbox feature built into your Toolbox is a more elegant solution for posting private galleries. Simply zip your files, upload them to your clickbooq FTP account using an FTP program like Fetch or AceFTP, and then send the link to your clients to download. For detailed instructions on using your new FTP account, login to the Support Center and do a quick search for “FTP” to find the KnowledgeBase article. Now that we have FTP enabled, adding blog hosting and other third party services should be coming down the pipe soon.

Spam is a serious issue that can greatly affect your productivity, security, and business. To protect you from receiving hundreds of spam messages or virus attacks, we have recently deployed Proofpoint’s advanced anti-spam and anti-virus service. Proofpoint uses an advanced machine learning filtering technique called MLX™ to ensure that no valid mail is improperly filtered. For more information about the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway and MLX, you can visit Proofpoint’s web site at www.proofpoint.com.

Google has upgraded their Analytics software and released improved tracking code. If you have already installed Google Analytics tracking code on your site within clickbooq’s Settings interface, we recommend installing the new code to take advantage of Google’s latest upgrades and improvements. The old tracking code looks like this (the x’s would be your unique Google Account number):

<script type=”text/javascript” src=” http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js “></script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct = “UA-xxxxxx-x”
urchinTracker();
</script>

The new tracking code looks like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.“);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js‘ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-xxxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

To update your Google Analytics tracking code, login to your Google Analytics account and click the Edit link next to your site profile on the Analytics Settings page, then select Check Status at the top-right of the table. Under Instructions for Adding Tracking, click the tab for New Tracking Code (ga.js).

Copy the entire block of code. Login to your clickbooq Toolbox and click the Settings tab. Select Google Analytics from the left-hand menu. Delete the old tracking code and paste your new code into the provided field. This will automatically update your tracking code on your website.

You can read more about Google’s improvements and upgrades to Google Analytics in their blog.

One of the feature requests we’ve been getting is adding a shopping cart or print fulfillment service. Although we are continuing to investigate the best way to provide this feature, we realize it’s no small task to develop a competitive ecommerce solution that matches all the bells and whistles of the shopping cart and print fulfillment services available for photographers out there today.

While creating a PayPal shopping cart option is the easiest route, this may not provide the integrated user experience professional photographers are searching for. So I thought I might suggest a few of the print fulfillment services I have come across. Before signing up with any print fulfillment partner, you’ll want to do your homework and talk to fellow photographers that use their services.

A few other tips:

• Find out what their commission structure is - will they be charging you a flat percentage? Do they charge set up fees or per event/gallery fees?
• Does their commission fee include credit card processing fees (typically 3%)?
• How often are you paid your profits? How is payment made?
• Will they be handling the printing? Ask for test prints to get a feel for their print quality.
• What size prints do they offer? What is the wholesale pricing per print? Do they offer other speciality products (cards, mugs, albums, etc.)
• How much is shipping & handling and who pays for it?
• How easy is the system to use? Ask for a demo and test uploading images and tools.
• What does the storefront look like? Can you customize the look and feel?
• Is the shopping cart user friendly? Can your clients easily navigate it and order prints?

For just a storefront, to handle ordering and payment processing, instaproofs charges a straight fee of 15% of the order, which includes credit card transaction fees, no monthly fees or per-event fees. They do not offer lab printing services, so you’ll have to do the print fulfillment and shipping on your own.
http://www.instaproofs.com

If you are just looking for print fulfillment services, WHCC (White House Custom Colour) is a popular print and finishing lab with a quick turnaround.
http://whcc.com

PhotoReflect partners with labs across the country to offer ordering, payment processing and fulfillment. There are no setup or monthly fees. PhotoReflect charges a straight commission of 15% of sales plus a 3% transaction fee. To fulfill your orders, you can send the order directly to one of their partner labs or fulfill the order yourself at the lab of your choice.
http://www.expressdigital.com/products/prstorefronts.shtm

Pictage is another service I’ve heard about, but you have to sign up for their promo dvd to see anything on their website so I don’t have all the details on them. Pictage appears to primarily target wedding and portrait photographers and has a partnership with weddingchannel.com, which can help wedding photographers get more exposure.

Shutterfly Professional Photo Gallery
According to an InfoTrends survey, Shutterfly is the most widely used online photo service. Sell your photos online using a service already known to consumers for their digital prints. Host up to 5 GB of images for $99/year ($199/year for unlimited hosting space) and a 15% commission. The commission covers order processing, accounting, monthly reporting and credit card transaction fees. Set your own pricing and sell various sized prints and photo gifts like mugs and magnets. Receive your profits via direct deposit to your bank acccount, once the wholesale printing costs and 15% commission fee has been deducted.
http://www.shutterfly.com/professional_photo_gallery/index.jsp

SmugMug Pro
SmugMug charges $149.95/year and has the same 15% commission structure but their wholesale printing prices appear to be lower and their storage is unlimited. Like clickbooq, they use amazon’s simple storage solution for image hosting, which helps explain how they can offer better prices. Prints are provided by EZ Prints. Another advantage to SmugMug is the ability to replace their logo, header, footer, and color scheme with your own logo and style so your shopping pages are more integrated with the design of your website.

There are a lot of providers in this field, and different ones cater to different types of photographers. You may find you would rather stay with your own local lab and handle ordering and fulfillment the old-fashioned way. Or, find a robust service that allows you to FTP all your high-res images and order complete photobooks. If you have suggestions for new features for clickbooq that will help with your marketing and/or workflow, start a discussion in our user forums. We’d love to hear from you.