22Slides

William is a great young photographer from NY. He’s also one of 22Slides’ early adopters, so we’ve had the pleasure of watching him refine his craft over the last few years.

Just like he’s constantly pushing his own work and not scared to try new things, he’s also pushing his website to explore what’s possible. His website with 22Slides has seen a few different revisions, but right now it’s a nice blend of built-in functionality and his own custom coding, providing a great example of a classy and beautifully minimal online presence, which compliments his work wonderfully.

[The photos in this article are just a small sample from a single project he’s working on, we definitely encourage you to check out more of his work on his website.]

So how did you get into photography?

I have always been interested in photography, but didn’t fully realize it until I was 18 or so. I had cameras before then, but that was the age when I started shooting regularly and reading a lot about photography. Many of my early images are of my family.

Can you tell us a little about the photographs here?

Sure, these are all pictures I’ve done in New York. They’re part of a long-term project I’m working on, where I document window displays - mainly of luxury and designer storefronts.

What do you look for when you are shooting the images for this series?

I am drawn to photograph the displays or pieces I find beautiful, or strange, or sometimes both.

What kind of equipment do you use most often?

For this series (and most of my work), I’m using a compact mirrorless camera with on-board flash. I’m walking a lot when I do these images, so I wanted something light.

Is there any one subject you would love to photograph?

Not one in particular. I usually have an idea about the storefronts from the runway shows, so sometimes I will go look for specific pieces. As far as people… There are a lot of models I would love to work with, too many to name really.

Have you read anything interesting lately?

I just started “On Photography” by Susan Sontag. I’ve been meaning to read it for a really long time, so it feels good to finally start.

Do you have any favorite films?

I have many favorites. For photography-related… “Helmut by June,” “Blow Up,” “Persona,” “Rear Window.”

What is some good advice someone has given you regarding your work?

Shortly after moving to New York, I met with a few photographers I’ve looked up to, and I asked them for some very direct criticism of my work. It was difficult to hear but also incredibly inspiring - it made me realize I could do much better work than I was doing.

Do you have any advice for aspiring photographers?

I would recommend taking a lot of time to reflect on your images after you shoot - not only to analyze their strengths and weaknesses, but also to try to view them with someone else’s eye in mind.

Why do you use 22slides for your site?

Simplicity, ease of use, interface/design, and of course the unparalleled customer service and support. It’s a great service - I’m very thankful to have their support.

Today we’re releasing an update that allows you to place text in your website’s header/sidebar area. We’re calling the feature “blurbs”, and you can add these to your site by choosing the “Informational Blurb” page type when creating a new page.

These should be perfect for adding abbreviated contact info right to your home page, or dividing up your navigation into section by using these blurbs as headings (like the image above). They’ll also offer another tier of hierarchy to your pages, if used in conjunction with drop down menus or other page groups.

Also with this update, we’re adding customizable footer text. Before, your copyright notice at the bottom of your website was set in stone, but now you can place whatever text you like there.

Note: Explicitly forbidding usage in your copyright notice doesn’t actually carry any more legal weight than our previous more “minimal” copyright notice, but it could help scare people from even trying.

We just released a new toolbar that can be added to the top left of the images on your site, allowing people to share that individual photo on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

You can enable this for your site from the “Social Media Sharing” section on the “Add-ons” page in your control panel.

[Screenshot from JordanVoth.com]

Today we launched a some new gallery layouts!

• New “Carousel” layout for sidebar-style websites.
• New “Horizontal” layout header/centered-style websites.
• New “Tile” layout, similar to the style made famous by Pinterest, available for both sidebar and header-style sites.
• All layouts are now available to Flickr pages too!

As always, you can change a gallery’s layout at the top of its page in your control panel, by clicking on any one of the layout icons.

We just recently launched all new, and much-improved mobile-optimized websites for everyone. They’re much better than our previous mobile sites in basically every way, and we think they’ll prove to be a much more unique, customizable, and efficient experience for your site’s mobile visitors.

(Mobile-optimized sites are available via the “Add-ons” section in your control panel.)

Logos

Now your mobile site will use the same logo as your main website does, automatically. No more need to upload special mobile files and write custom CSS.

Automatic Design Inheriting

Along with the new logo feature, your mobile site will now inherit the overall design from your main website automatically. Fonts, colors, etc will automatically match the rest of your website, providing a much more unique look to your mobile website than before, and without any extra work!

More Efficient Navigation

Now every page has a full “hamburger button” navigation bar, so visitors can navigate to any page, from anywhere, without needing to first go back to the home page. This saves valuable time and bandwidth for mobile visitors.

Image Download Blocker

If you have our image download blocker add-on enabled, it will now also work on your mobile site as well.

Better Use of Real Estate

Mobile devices obviously have limited screen space, so we’ve made small adjustments to allow your images to be displayed as large as possible, eliminating borders where it’s practical.

New Global Content Delivery System & Faster Loading Times

Now your photos are distributed among 200+ servers located around the world, ensuring your visitors are able to see your work quickly, no matter where they’re located. Depending on the location, the average speed increase is between 21% and 80%.

High-Resolution/Retina Logos

Now graphics that you use for your website’s logo can be retina-resolution, so they look crisp on high-resolution devices like the iPad and newer MacBooks. Just upload a logo graphic that’s twice as big as it needs to be, and the website will do the rest.

Improved Logo Graphic Handling

Logo graphics are also automatically resized to fit the available space on your website, so there’s no need to pre-resize your logo in Photoshop before uploading, it’s all done for you.

Translucent Colors

Our design editor now lets you select transparency for any color you choose, allowing you to create nice translucent/overlaid effects without having to learn CSS code.

Improvements to our ‘Sidebar’ Layout

We made it much easier to make horizontal-scrolling images scroll behind the sidebars, as well improved keyboard (left/right) navigation between images.

Customizable Sidebar Widths

Now you can adjust your sidebar’s width right from the design editor.

Improved Formatting for Mobile Devices

We made lots of small improvements to the way websites are displayed on small screens, particularly with sideways-scrolling photo galleries.

Improved Flickr Sets Formatting

Refinements were made to the way Flickr photo sets were displayed, improving the way each set’s thumbnail is displayed.

New Link Icons

We included a new logos in our ‘social media link icons’ add-on, including Yelp and GitHub.

Other Misc Improvements & Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that caused some pages in the control panel to not be clickable.
• Fixed bug that made it impossible to change a custom domain once, then back to the original domain again.
• Fixed issue that caused text pages’ images to take a long time to update after being replaced.
• Added error message to contact forms, to let people know of they didn’t fill it out properly.
• Improved spam filtering at forum.22slides.com.

If you happen to notice your website loading a bit faster than before, that’s because it is!

Late last week, we introduced a new “global content delivery system”, which means images download fast no matter what part of the world your visitor is located.

Typically, the farther from a server you are, the slower the website feels. But what we’ve done is put your files on over 200 servers located all around the world, so no matter where someone views your website, it will download quickly, from a server located nearby.

In California, we see a speed increase of about 21%, which works out to about a second faster on most image gallery pages, but places like New York, Europe and Australia should see even better results.

Here’s a look at just how much faster our servers respond to requests from different parts of the world:

• California: 52ms to 10ms lag (81% Improvement)
• New York: 224ms to 10ms lag (96% Improvement)
• London: 95ms to 11ms lag (88% Improvement)
• Munich, Germany: 137ms to 6ms lag (96% Improvement)
• Sao Paulo, Brazil: 261ms to 114ms lag (56% Improvement)
• Israel: 178ms to 73ms lag (59% Improvement)
• Sydney, Australia: 209ms to 1ms lag (99% Improvement)
• South Africa: 261ms to 178ms lag (32% Improvement)
• Netherlands: 247ms to 2ms lag (99% Improvement)
• Singapore: 106ms to 1ms lag (99% Improvement)

It took us a little while, but we wanted to make sure we got it right!

Page grouping is the ability to put pages inside other pages to add another level of organization to your website. For example, you could have a page named “Weddings” and have a gallery for each couple within that page, and it’s as easy as dragging and dropping pages into each other.

Page groups come in two different flavors: Thumbnail grids and drop-down menus:

Thumbnail Grids

Thumbnail grids will display a thumbnail and title for each gallery it contains. JordanVoth.com is a nice example of this.

We have quick how-to article outlining how to do this on your site here: httsp://help.22slides.com/article/collection-groups

Drop-Down Menus

Drop-down menus are great for including different types of pages into a single button in your site’s navigation, and they’re created almost exactly the same way: https://help.22slides.com/article/dropdown-menu

Other Stuff

And as usual, we snuck a few more updates in too:

• Made the horizontal scrollbar slightly larger and bolder to improve its obviousness
• Added an optional “phone” field to contact forms
• Extended the grace period for accounts with failed payments, to allow people more time to get new cards from their bank, etc.
• Updated entire database structure to latest industry standards for improved speed and reliability
• Increased frequency of automated system backups to make sure data is even safer
• Made improvements to non-Latin character support, like those in Hebrew, Japanese, etc.
• Fixed issue with apostrophes getting “scrambled” in messages sent from contact forms
• Created new development workflow to allow for faster improvements in the future

Another round of new features just made its way to your website!

• More Photos. As we grow, we’re able to scale our resources up. And thanks to our awesome customers, we were able to increase the photo limit from 500 photos to 750.
• Way More Photos. If you haven’t heard, Flickr now offers 1TB of storage for free, which means you can potentially put hundreds of thousands of photos on your website, for free, if you use our Flickr add-on.
• Panorama Support. We’ve changed the way images are resized, allowing panoramic images to be as wide as they need to be, while still matching the height of your other landscape-oriented photos so everything stays nicely aligned.

We just released a few new features/updates, here’s the list:

• Better Full-Screen Home Page Photos. How-so? We’ve started from scratch on the full-screen option, taking full advantage of the latest browser capabilities. This means both image quality and slideshow smoothness are better, especially with Safari.
• Tumblr Blog Image Captions. Now your Tumblr blog will display the captions for photos added to photo gallery posts.
• Downloadable Annual Receipts. It’s a little late for this tax season, but you can now download a receipt for all your invoices for a given year, which should come in handy around tax time. This feature is on your “Account > Billing History” page.
• Minimal Copyright Notice. Now the copyright notice at the bottom of your site is more minimal, taking up less space, while still carrying the same legal weight as the longer version.