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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.

We don’t know how else to introduce Jordan other than saying he’s really good. Really really good. Very few can make natural light work so well and look so easy. Something about the light, vibe, and just plain genuineness of his work make him one of our most popular clients we’ve been lucky enough to work with.

He’s 23, lives in Seattle, has been shooting for 5 years, and we definitely think he’s someone you should know about (if you don’t already).

https://jordanvoth.com
https://twitter.com/jordanvoth
https://facebook.com/jordanvothphotography
https://flickr.com/photos/jojo2fast

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Who are you and why the heck would anyone want to read this interview?

As you’ve probably read, my name is Jordan and I’m a portrait and wedding photographer based out of Seattle. I’m lucky enough to work with some pretty awesome people who make my job a heck of a lot easier. I hope you’ll like what you see.

How were you introduced to photography?

During my senior year of high school my friend and I used to go out to cool locations and take photos of our cars (pretty lame, I know). Towards the end of that year I got my first dSLR and began shooting bands and soon after geared more towards portraits. I found that meeting new people and hearing so many different stories from different people is what really drew me to that aspect of photography.

What kind of work is your favorite?

I love shooting portraits but have recently begun moving more towards weddings. There’s just something about photographing two people in love that is completely awesome (plus you can end up traveling to some AWESOME locations). Engagement sessions are always such a fun time as well; the more unique the better. I really look forward to photographing those.

Whose work do you look up to the most?

I have a couple favorites that are more portrait photographers and a couple wedding photographers. Cheyenne Ellis, Collin Hughes & Spencer Combs are a few of my favorite portrait photographers. The candid/real life aspect of their photos is what really drew me, along with many others, to their work. I’ve had a chance to hang out with both Collin & Spencer and they’re two of the nicest and most humble guys ever. It’s really cool. Benj Haisch, Shannen Norman & Carl Zoch are some of the most inspiring wedding photographers to me. I can spend hours on their blogs/websites. Their work is simply incredible.

What kind of equipment do you use most often?

I use a Canon 5d Mark II for all of my shoots. I have three lenses: Canon 35mm f/1.4L, Canon 50mm f/1.2L & a Sigma 85mm f/1.4. Every now and then I’ll shoot film and for that I use either a Canon AE-1 or Canon Elan 7. Since I primarily shoot with natural light, I don’t have much lighting equipment, but I’m hoping to invest in a little bit of that in the near future.

What’s your photo editing software of choice? Any special tricks of the trade?

I’m a Photoshop man. I also will use Capture One every now and then as well. Lately, I’ve been really digging the VSCO sets. Every photographer should know how to use layer masks, it helps a ton.

If you could have done one thing different with your photography career so far, what would it be?

I wish I would have started shooting weddings sooner and wouldn’t have been so afraid to just say yes and book one. Basically this just means get outside of your comfort zone, it may be the best thing ever! I turned down quite a few because I felt they were too nerve wrecking and I didn’t think I was capable of doing a good job but now that I’ve shot a few I think they’re just awesome to do! I rarely find myself too stressed out at all. Don’t be afraid to try new things.

What are some of your favorite things?

I love being outside and exploring new places. Driving my car and listening to music go hand in hand together and if gas wasn’t so expensive, I would probably drive around the country again. I’m also a huge fan of movies, hot chocolate & spreadsheets.

What are some of your least-favorite things?

I hate ranch. I’m probably one of the few people who do, but I cannot stand it haha.

Why do you use 22Slides for your website?

I was in the process of looking for a new website company to use and came across 22slides through a friend of mine. Their sites were exactly what I had in mind for a new site. I signed up for a trial and couldn’t get over how easy it was to update and maintain my website. Their customer service is top notch as well and is a large factor as to why they’re such a great company. I highly recommend signing up for a trial and giving 22slides a try if you’re in the search for a new website. You won’t regret it.