Warren Diggles Photography and Design

This post highlights a CSS Only Drop Down Menu that was modified for Photoshelter from Superfish CSS Drop Down Menu for Joomla!. The reason to use a CSS only menu is that for security reasons Photoshelter (Photography Websites), does not allow scripting to be imported into their templates. This is why a CSS only menu solution is the best solution for Photoshelter customization. Not only does a CSS only drop down menu work with Photoshelter, but it is faster than other web menu methods, and all the while contributing excellent SEO to your website.

Here are some links to working examples:
CSS Only Drop Down Menu Code
Colorado Stock Photography
Stock Photography of Western Canada

Here is a working example of SuperFish for Joomla! menu:
The Best Colon Cleanse Ever Made! - Original Joomla! Superfish component customized with rounded corners

Live example of mfDockMenu working with Joomla!

While working on this website project I found a cool menu effect to highlight their products. The module is mfDockMenu, the difficult thing about using this module is that there are not any live examples of it working with Joomla! After tweaking and going through the comments a number of times to try different things I was finally able to get it to work and now have a working version of the script on a Joomla! installation co-existing with Front Page Slideshow.

If you have any questions on how to make it work please feel free to contact me via email.

Advertising Photography Questions (including answers)

Thank you Jaak for question #1

Jaak Writes

Hi Warren,

…What words are better to use for gallery description and gallery name. Stock photos, stock images, stock pictures or stock photography. I understood about your research that images is not the best solution. But I have seen a sites in Google like it http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np.grand-canyon.html if I wrote grand canyon stock photos. You can see in gallery description words like pictures and stock photos too. What do you think. Do you have any idea for best solution… There is a lot of other factors for good SEO too what we should to use. By the way do you have had some success with good SEO ranking. I mean does any photo buyer found your stock images thanks to your good ranking. There is philosophical question for me. I think that serious photo buyer use a stock image banks like Getty, Alamy only. So a SEO is not important for them. SEO is important for people who do not know about image banks. My conclusion is that some not serious picture buyer will found our images thanks for good ranking, but they do not pay money for pictures. I hope that I am not right….

Sorry about my english

All the best,
Jaak Nilson

–
Jaak Nilson Photostock
Phone: +372 502 6327
www.jaaknilson.ee

Response

Hello Jaak,

Just ran a few terms through Google Adwords Keyword Tool and these are the average worldwide search totals/month:
stock images - 165,000
stock photos - 550,000
stock pictures - 22,200
stock photography - 201,000

stock photos is the most popular, but photography and images are searched a lot too. My thoughts would be to have images, photos and photography in your seo. I use “stock photo image” in my page titles - iptc headlines for images. Because my site name is Northern Colorado Stock Photography then I have “stock photo image and photography” all in the page titles. For my filenames I am putting a descriptive term with the file # name. ie A8EW0225-Chocolate-Milk-Glass-Bottle.jpg this way your filename numbers are not messed up and you have a descriptive name in the title. Still a work in progress though, I don’t have quite half of the images ready yet.

So far I have not had great success through Photoshelter with SEO, but I know that what they are saying to do is good SEO and I believe that Photoshelter will continue to improve on their end so I am integrating their recommendations into my site.

Hopefully this helps,
Warren

–

Warren Diggles Photography & Design
www.warrendiggles.com
(970)412-0583

/***These are actual emails that have been copied and pasted***/

One of the many things I love about this world we live in is how you never know where opportunities are going to come from. Over casual dinner conversation Hank Grey from Madison Insurance and Cathy Halpern, owner of Organized Balance were talking when the subject of websites came up. Well one thing led to another and Cathy recommended our services, Madison Insurance contacted us, I headed down to Denver for a meeting with Hank and Murray DeLine, and now we are managing their website. Thank you Cathy for the referral, and thank you Madison Insurance for the business.

Madison Insurance Website Redesign
If you are interested in our website redesign and management services please email us at info@warrendiggles.com then we will set up a time to strategize your website marketing.

The first step of the project was a site and functionality redesign. If your website was created a number of years ago there is a good chance that it needs to be redesigned and rethought. When redesigning a site it generally makes most sense to use the current content and page linking as the starting point. We are not reinventing the information just rethinking the way it will be presented and organized to get the most out of it in the future. Of course there are modifications to the information but that is done throughout the process.
» More about the Madison Insurance site redesign...

The website for Morning Fresh Dairy performs many marketing tasks. One of these is the Online Order Changes form - a PHP email form with database functionality that gets used 100 times a day. With this form dairy customers can conveniently make changes to their order, cancel a delivery, or add items as needed. All of this can be done twenty-four hours a day.

Screen shot of Morning Fresh Dairy's online order changes - note the image links on the right hand side of the page. These ad links are randomly chosen from a folder that contains several different ones. These are designed to introduce random products to current customers of the dairy, products that the dairy offers for home delivery.

The order changes form saves the office staff two to three hours of labor a day because these tasks used to be done on the telephone. Order changes also generate add on sales because of its ease of use and ability to add items to your order simply.

Functionality like this will bring very real and measurable profits to your business.

{Edit 3/30/09}
Since FaceBook changed their interface my screen shots do not match the current FB website, and my new to me now old FB Fanpage looks a bit drab with the new FB interface. OK my first opinion is they are on the right track and I guess it is time to update the branding on my FB Fan Page. This is something that has just been put on the list of things to do…

Embedding a Photoshelter Flash Gallery to your Fan Page still works the same way, FaceBook just changed their interface so it will appear different.

More coming soon…er or later
{/Edit}

Photography and Marketing Facebook Fan Page - click link to see a Photoshelter flash gallery embedded to Facebook fan page and by all means become a Fan!

Before you can add a Photoshelter flash gallery to a Facebook fan page you need to install » More info embed Photoshelter flash gallery to Facebook fan page...

As marketing on the internet evolves many companies will be looking to redesign their websites. Businesses will want to update information, add new functionality, upgrade the design and interface, etc…

Currently I am working on a website redesign for Madison Insurance, a Denver based insurance brokerage (more on this later…). While I was researching their current website I noticed this interesting little icon on the contact us page with the words “contact manager information” next to it. Of course I decided to click it. » More info on vCards

There is no place like home…
Home is where the heart is…
Home sweet Home…

Why does the word ‘home’ have such strong connotations towards something special? Because it is ingrained in us to experience joy, the joy of laughter, the joy of friendship, the joy of memories and experiences. » More Home is where the heart is...

During the last couple of months I have been fortunate enough to produce websites for 2 different authors and publishers (It is weird how I have never done any work for an author and then 2 months in a row…)

Anyway this first example is an online store redesign for a fabulously done book about Vintage Hairstyling by Lauren Rennells, excellent idea for Christmas gifts btw. (more…)

Had a request from Jon at Zajan Publishing today about adding a share on Facebook link, never heard of such a thing before…

Google’d it and found that it is an extremely simple and brilliantly useful tool. Here is a link to the code:

http://www.facebook.com/posted.php#/share_partners.php

The “Link and Image” choice creates a Facebook post on your profile, you enter a post and somehow it ‘captures’ an image and a link from the page that is automatically put into Facebook (Not sure how it is done but in this example it picked a picture of the book, coincidence??) It definitely is something to look into…