With a huge image resolution of 1800x1200px, your images will scale beautifully. Choose to have your viewers enable fullscreen viewing on their own, or enable automatic fullscreen viewing for your clickbooq website and Presentation Mode will take over automatically once a portfolio is accessed.

This is a free update for all clickbooq users!

Click here to learn more about Presentation Mode. And if you’re already a clickbooq user, download our User Guide to enable it for your website.

Click here to learn more about our Lightbox galleries.

As an added bonus, we’ve also removed our previous limitations on Portfolios and Content Pages, so you can have the flexibility you need to show off your best work.

There’s no better time to sign up and create your custom website with clickbooq.

This is the deal you’ve been waiting for!

Existing user? Learn more about switching plans in our Support Center

Features:

• Redesigned Homepage with interactive pulldown menus to navigate quickly and easily to any portfolio or Content Page
• You get the same great viewing experience and featureset on iPad, iPhone, or Android devices.
• Automatic detection for mobile devices allows full-screen image viewing with touch-enabled swipe gestures.
• Smart, pre-caching loads the next image while you view the current one, to make the viewing experience seem faster for slow mobile connections
• Thumbnail grid allows viewers to jump quickly to any image in your portfolio
• Captions displayed in an overlay if your images are pre-populated with them
• Animated Homepage slideshow

Check out any of our user’s websites in our Gallery on your favorite mobile device to see for yourself. Here’s a few screenshots of the experience on the iPad:

“In China I had plenty of opportunities to test out my camera’s HD capabilities. When I got back, I showed all the video footage to my intern/video editor Kyle and said, ‘Make something cool!’ That is when the Shanghai Waltz was born.

This video montage depicts China through the western ‘HD’ eye and captures the controlled chaos of humanity as well as the complex, bizarre, yet peaceful culture of our friends to the east. Enjoy!”

Look no further – we’ve added a PayPal shopping cart to your clickbooq website that makes it easy for your site visitors to buy any product you sell. Now, you can give your clients the ability to shop on your clickbooq website and checkout using PayPal’s Website Payments Standard solution.

PayPal is one of the most widely used online payment solutions available worldwide. It is a safe and easy way for your clients to pay you online.  Clients simply click the Add to Cart button next to your purchase-enabled images. They are then redirected to PayPal’s secure website where they can login to their PayPal account or choose to pay without logging in. After paying they return to your clickbooq website.

To use PayPal with your clickbooq website, you’ll need to sign up with PayPal for a PayPal Business or Premier account. A Premier Account lets you buy and sell online using credit cards, debit cards, or bank account payments. A Business Account has the same capabilities but lets you set up more than one user with access to the account. If you are within the United States and other countries, except the UK, visit http://www.paypal.com. If you are in the UK, visit http://www.paypal.co.uk. It is free to sign up for a PayPal account. When you sell something on PayPal, PayPal will charge you a transaction fee based on the amount of each sale. These fees range from 1.9% to 2.9% plus $0.30. For more information on fees, see https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside.

Once you have entered the requested account information, verified your email address, and provided a credit card or bank account, your PayPal account will be activated.

Now you will need to enable the PayPal feature for your clickbooq website. Login to your Toolbox and click the Settings tab.  Check the box for Enable PayPal Shopping Cart and enter the email address associated with your PayPal account.

Now you can start creating your products within the Organize tab. Double-click the image you would like to make available for purchase. This will launch the Image Info Editor.

Click the tab marked Purchase Info. Check the box marked, “This image is available for purchase”.

Enter the product and payment details of your item. You will enter the item name, item ID, price, weight, tax and shipping for each item.

Images you have enabled for purchase are indicated with a star within Organize.

When visitors click the Add to Cart link on your site, they will automatically be taken to a secure PayPal page, which shows the Item Name, Number, and Price of the item they added to their cart. The buyer can continue shopping on your site and when they are ready to check out, they can pay for their items through the PayPal interface. Once the purchase is complete, you and your client will receive an email confirmation with purchase info.

You can also create PayPal Add to Cart buttons for selling specialty products on your Content Pages. These may be items that are not attached to a single image, such as Books, DVDs, or other custom products.

For detailed instructions on selling images with your clickbooq website, see the updated clickbooq User Guide.

We’ve made improvements across the board to clickbooq’s web-based software and client websites, making it even easier for you to create and maintain a custom, full-featured Flash portfolio website. With clickbooq 3.0, you can start selling your images and specialty products online with an integrated PayPal shopping cart. You can also create multiple portfolio sections and custom-name each one. Your new site has even more design flexibility and customization options plus features to help increase your profits and move your business forward.

New Features & Updates

Layout & Style:

• We’ve given you even more fonts to choose from – check out Flood, Copperplate, Eurostile, Graphite, Optima, Trade Gothic, and VAG Rounded – choose the perfect typeface for your personal style.

Organize:

• Organize your portfolios with our newly designed tree menu system, making editing easier and more intuitive than ever.
• Create up to 3 Portfolio sections, each with their own sub-portfolios. And you can custom-name all of your Portfolio sections – change Portfolio to Work, Gallery, Projects, etc. to suit your needs.

• Start selling your prints online with an integrated PayPal cart. Perfect for selling your artwork, this simple cart lets you create products for sale and handle payment through PayPal’s secure interface.
• New Lightbox feature allows the display of image file names, instead of captions, for easy file referencing and proofing. Toggle this feature on/off for individual Lightboxes you’ve created.
• Enhanced Lightbox messaging tool allows for BCC/CC support.
• Set your Homepage to random slideshow – your homepage slideshow rotates randomly through six of your selected images – a different look each visit.
• New Image Sort function helps you quickly browse and locate images within your Image Archives.
• Unlimited image caption length – get as descriptive as you want.

Content Pages:

• Enhanced usability for creating your Content Pages and buttons.

• Link directly to Email Addresses or external URLs from the Navigation Menu – great for sending your visitors to your Blog.

• Create PayPal Add to Cart buttons for your content page links so you can start selling your specialty items (ie. Books, DVDs, actions).

Settings:

• Intuitive image click-to-advance feature now allows reverse viewing as well as ghosted arrows to indicate direction.

• Set your slideshows to start automatically for your Portfolios. You can also control the delay in seconds between images.
• Upload your own custom Favicon. This custom graphic gets displayed next to your website address in the web browser.
• New editable Terms page allows you to set your own copyright and usage information.

Other Site Enhancements:

• Sites now support deep linking which allows you to directly link to specific portfolios or Content Pages of your site. Useful for directing clients to specific sections of your site as well as for enhanced search engine visibility.
• Portfolios can now loop in reverse, once all portfolio images have loaded.

We’ll be posting more information and tutorials on these new features. First one up is setting up your integrated PayPal shopping cart…

Images courtesy of Gavin Bond Photography.

We are pleased to announce a new partnership with RedCart to bring all clickbooq users a full-featured and easy-to-use online proofing and shopping cart system. We know being able to sell your prints and specialty products online to your clients is an integral part of your business. Since your shopping cart site should be an extension of your portfolio site, we looked for a solution that was as customizable and easy to update as clickbooq. Based on recommendations for our current users, we discovered RedCart, whose design, functionality, and philosophy were very similar to ours. Like clickbooq, RedCart is a web-based application that was built on the Adobe Flex platform, a framework for building and maintaining applications that deploy consistently across all major browsers and operating systems. It also allows for rapid updating and development – key for adding new features and updates to keep pace with the needs of the photo industry.

Upload your own custom backgrounds to match your branding. Image courtesy of Red Leaf Studios.

In doing our initial research, we were surprised to discover some of the software for photographer’s online ordering systems did not work on Macs or ran into compatibility issues. We also did not favor systems that locked you into a predefined list of photo labs. Since photographers have unique needs and different workflows, we wanted to give as much flexibility as possible for offering the products and services you want and fulfilling your orders. This lets you maintain control of the quality of your finished products and ensures you are the only one contacting your clients. Any services that tacked on hefty commissions or transaction fees was also a no-no.

Of all the services we compared, RedCart had by far the most reasonable and straightforward pricing. All you pay is a subscription fee, on a monthly or annual basis. And through our partnership with RedCart, we are able to offer special pricing just for clickbooq clients. There are no commission fees, per print fees, per gallery fees, sales transaction fees (other than from your payment processor, if you accept credit cards through your merchant account or PayPal), shipping and handling costs, or order minimums. By processing your own credit card payments, you’ll pay on average 3% compared to the 10% – 15% most of these proofing services are charging. If you are selling $500 in prints a wedding, that adds up to a difference of $60 per client. And if you are already processing credit cards in studio, it’s a no-brainer to process credit card transactions through your own merchant account.

The shopping cart is smart, intuitive, and all-in-all, a pleasure to use. And it includes all the bells-and-whistles you would expect for a high-end service: flash galleries and slideshows, password-protected galleries, client-enabled cropping, black & white and sepia tone previews, custom order confirmation emails. And from the admin side, you’ll have access to client login stats including login emails, sales and revenue reports, the ability to set your own gallery expiration dates and send email reminders. We think you’ll find it gives you everything you need to offer ecommerce through your website. To find out more about this new service, visit clickbooq.com/proofbooq.

Enable customer cropping of your images and save on image processing and production time. Image courtesy of Cory Parris.

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!

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.