Customizing your photoblog

Monday Jul 23, 2007

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of interest in pixyBlog, which is great news for us and our users... we must be doing something right! We've been signing-up more beta-testers than ever before and the full release is just around the corner.

With the release of version 3.1 we have started to see a number of photoblogs being fully customized, another great step forward as this is exactly what we want to see. It's fine that we can create different Themes for our users, but we want to make the pixyBlog platform as open and easily customizable as possible, and seeing some of our users doing exactly this is very encouraging. So I thought I would take some time-out to write about the different customizations going on now and how others can do the same.

Customizing your About page

By far the easiest way to add your own content to your About page is to simply edit your site description (Preferences > Settings). From here you can enter text and links, include images and add much more. The majority of our users have done this in varying degrees, from text descriptions and contact details, e.g:

to more in-depth descriptions and inclusion of images, e.g:

Checkout our User FAQ for more details.

Bookmarks and links to other sites

pixyBlog has a built-in bookmark manager, so it's easy to add your own bookmarks. Perhaps you run another Blog or have a Flickr profile you want to link to, you can simple add these from the admin area (Blog > Bookmarks). It's also a good idea to link to friends blogs/photoblogs/websites and sites which you like to visit; this not only helps your visitors but can also help promote your site (see promoting your website for more information).

Most Themes will include your bookmarks on the About page of your site. Alternatively if you want to link to external sites from your navigation bar, then check this FAQ.

Adding new pages

A lot of our users have created their own custom pages on their sites. These can be for all sorts of reasons; if you're a wedding photographer you might want to have a page with rates and booking information. Another might want a page of client testimonials or your latest news & offers. Whatever the reason, creating your own pages is easy; checkout our wiki section on customizing your website.

These are just a few of our users who have created their own pages:

Changing the default homepage

Another feature which is now possible with pixyBlog is to change the default homepage of your site. Perhaps you want to include a multimedia flash slideshow, or if you run multiple sites then a portal page with links off to each of your sites. A few of our users are currently using this feature, including:

To change the homepage of your site read our wiki section on customizing your website.

Adding a payment option

A couple of our users have added payment options from their sites to allow easy payment through either PayPal or Google Checkout.

Adding Video

Finally, it would appear pixyBlog is stepping into the video market... ok, not really. But embedded video has appeared on one of our users sites. Checkout the following post by Mark Fleming; http://markfleming.pixyblog.com/entry/speed-sp%C3%A9d-noun-the-rate.

pixyBlog will continue to make it as easy as possible to create your own bespoke photoblogs. The next release has some new features which will help with this. I will post an article on the these, and more, upcoming features shortly.

Posted at 10:03PM Jul 23, 2007 by Richard Jones |